Zach Brown: Ricciardo contract allows us to break up

Zack Brown, chief executive of McLaren Racing, made it clear that the contract with Daniel Ricciardo includes the option of early termination, but the parties would like to prevent that.

The Australian has built up a very worthy reputation over the past 11 seasons in Formula 1 and at McLaren he receives very high compensation – this was also the case with the Renault works team, where he played before. However, in 2022, when the championship teams move to a new generation of cars, Ricciardo regularly loses to his partner Lando Norris, both in qualifying and in races.

Recently, Brown said the partnership with Daniel has not lived up to their expectations, and yesterday the rider admitted that it has. At the same time, both the team and Ricciardo emphasize that they are determined to keep working so he can restore his old form, which allowed him to take seven wins with Red Bull once, and add one more win at Monza last year. , who already drives a McLaren car.

Zach Brown is in the US this weekend watching the US Arrow McLaren SP team prepare for the famous Indy 500 race, but spoke remotely to the press accredited for the Monaco Grand Prix. During this conversation, he was asked if there were any clauses in the contract with Riccardo that would allow for early termination.

“I don’t want to go into the details of the contract. It articulates our mutual obligations, but also provides mechanisms that allow us to part ways,” Brown replied. “I’ve talked to Daniel about this because we’re not getting the results both sides hoped for, but we’re still going to do our best.

I think we proved at Monza that we can win races. We also need to keep improving our car, so we can’t fight for wins just yet, but we would like to see Daniel in higher positions. Let’s see how everything will develop and we need to understand what he wants.”

Before the start of the weekend in Monaco, Ricciardo was in quite a combative mood and in the first practice on Friday he showed the seventh result, but at the very start of the second session he seriously crashed the car in the pool area.

The rider was somewhat baffled by the circumstances of the accident, but suggested that he and the team were overdoing it when setting up the car: “For the second training session, we decided to run a series of experiments, trying to increase the pace. of the car, but we have crossed a certain line. It’s not clear until you’ve checked everything on the track, but it was my first lap so I didn’t have much time to figure it out.

It’s a bit of a shame that this happened, but I’m sure we can catch up with the team.”

Ricciardo’s contract with McLaren stipulates that he will drive for this team until the end of 2023, and when the leader, Andreas Seidl, was asked if he could confirm that the squad would not change next season, the German manager stated: “As we have them said that the contracts with our riders will be valid next year, so now we are doing everything we can to make it all work effectively.”