Christian Horner acknowledged that Daniel Ricciardo sees a return to Formula 1 via AlphaTauri as the best-case scenario to claim a place at Red Bull Racing in 2025. At the same time, the head of the team from Milton Keynes stressed that so far they have no plans to continue working with the Australian beyond 2023.
“We have no thoughts or expectations regarding a more distant perspective. We have loaned him to AlphaTauri until the end of the year,” Horner said on the next edition of the F1 Nation podcast. – Obviously Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez will remain our drivers next year, but having a talented driver in reserve is always good.
I think Daniel sees AlphaTauri as a transitional step that will allow him to move to Red Bull in 2025. This is his cherished goal. He believes performing as part of AlphaTauri is the best way to declare his intentions for 2025. Daniel is ready to take a step back so he can try to take two steps forward.”
At the same time, Horner also stressed that the team continues to believe in Sergio Perez and is ready to fully support him.
“Part of his failures are due to bad luck, part of it was Sergio’s fault,” he continued. “We are just trying to help him through this period. He is still second in the individual standings, has won two of the ten Grand Prix so far this year and has had an excellent start to the season. We just want to help him get back in shape.”
Horner has repeatedly said the decision to replace Nick de Vries with Ricciardo was taken after the Australian made a great impression in Pirelli’s recent testing at Silverstone. He shared new details and recalled the events of 10 years ago: Red Bull then decided to sign a contract with Daniel, after analyzing his work on tests.
“We were looking for a driver to replace Mark Webber in the team, and then Kimi Raikkonen was one of the favourites,” recalled Horner. – And in recent testing at Silverstone this is what impressed me the most: we understood that Daniel hadn’t been behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car for seven months, but after three or four laps he showed a time that was less than was then given me a moment.
Over the course of his first full race on similar tyres, we saw him driving more and more confidently, and then Daniel showed the time that would allow him to start from the front row at Silverstone. It was about his seventh lap that day, which left a strong impression on us. It was great to see that he can still perform at such a high level.
When I told him that he could start from the front row with a result like that, you should have seen how relieved he was. It can be said that a heavy weight was lifted from his shoulders when he felt that he could still show high speeds.
His long laps were also very good and the work he did for Pirelli was absolutely top notch. We saw old Daniel.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
