Marco: Ricciardo has broken the gentlemen’s agreement

Many, including Helmut Marko, believe that the turning point in Daniel Ricciardo’s career was his decision to switch from Red Bull Racing to the Renault factory team in the summer of 2018.

However, according to Marko, the Australian then violated the gentleman’s agreement, which was sealed with a handshake, because he personally promised him and Dietrich Mateschitz, then head of Red Bull, to sign a new long-term contract with the Milton team. Keynes.

How this happened, Red Bull’s motorsport consultant explained in an interview with Formula1.de: “We were organizing some kind of event on the central square of Graz, after which we sat down at the table together, talked and finally came to a gentlemen’s agreement. , which was sealed with a handshake.

After this he went to Salzburg, where he met with Dietrich Mateschitz, and the same thing happened there. However, Ricciardo had doubts about the Honda engines we were switching to, so in the end it turned out that Cyril Abiteboul, the then head of Renault F1, was able to convince him.

Mateschitz did not like this, because he always believed that agreements concluded with a handshake should be respected.”

If we ask Ricciardo’s opinion on that story, we will probably hear a slightly different version of events. But since parting ways with Red Bull Racing, he has only been on the podium once, and that is a fact. But then as now, Daniel assures that he has no regrets.

Let us remember his words spoken more than five years ago, in the summer of 2019: “When I decided to move to Renault last year, it made a lot of noise. But then everything calmed down. You see, sometimes you have an inner conviction that you are doing the right thing…’

Well, Ricciardo is one of those who always does everything his own way, but only he himself bears responsibility for the consequences of such decisions. And in this he can perhaps be compared with the lyrical hero of the legendary hit My Way, which became popular worldwide thanks to Frank Sinatra, although the song was originally composed and performed by Claude Francois with a completely different French text, but that’s not the point .

Here is a literal translation of the second verse of My Way: “Regret? Yes, there are a few, but again, too few to mention. I did what I had to do and completed everything without exception. I charted the course myself and thought about every step on an unknown path, but something else is much more important: I did everything my own way…”