Over the weekend, Aussie F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo made a shocker of an announcement that he will be leaving his current post at Aston Martin Red Bull at the end of the 2018 season for a 2019 seat at Renault Sport F1 where he will be racing alongside Nico Hulkenberg.
The Renault team themselves later officiated the initial news drop, stating that 29-year old native of Perth will stay with the team for at least the next 2 cycles, from next year through the end of the 2020 season. The departure marks the end of a decade long association with the Red Bull team and subsidiaries, having rose up through various other open wheel racing series, often with the energy drink as a major sponsor.
In 2010, Ricciardo got his start in the ‘pinnacle of motorsport’, winning the role of test driver for Red Bull’s junior team, Scuderia Torro Rosso, before proving his worthiness on the starting grid in 2012. His success there earned him a spot in Red Bull Racing starting in 2014, a team which had just clinched the constructor’s championship for four straight years after the previous season.
To date, and within Formula 1, Daniel has secured seven Grand Prix wins and has climbed to the podium on 29 occasions. His strong performance here does raise questions as to what motivates this sudden departure from Red Bull.
Aside from the arguments about change, opportunity, and variety, one quite obvious possibility is Red Bull’s decision to adopt a new engine supplier for the 2019 season, recently inking a deal with Honda and ending its partnership with Renault with F1 powertrains from Japanese automaker having already been powering with Scuderia Torro Rosso cars in 2018 to favourable results.
Honda, after their factory outfit had sold the F1 team and accompanying tech to Brawn GP just prior to the 2009 season (which they won, ironically), has been struggling to match the power and reliability of competing engines from team rivals Mercedes-AMG and Ferrari since re-entering the sport in 2015 with McLaren.
Perhaps, then, that the brass at Red Bull Racing has been made privy to some yet unknown significant advantage that the next Honda hybrid V6 will boast for the 2019 car, explaining their split with Renault as longstanding engine partner.
Ricciardo may still be quite skeptical about those chances, and may be fearing a possible decline in performance and championship standing similar to the outcome seen by Honda 3 years ago - one they’re still recovering from. Off the track, some grumbles have been audible about the Red Bull RB14 cars not having the outright pace to keep the heat on the Ferrari and Mercedes-AMG, with their racers missing a clean shot at the Driver’s Championship as a result.
What has grown into the Renault Sport team can be traced back to the racing efforts of the Bennetton Group, which in its latter 1990s heyday fielded such drivers such as Michael Schumacher, Johnny Herbert, and Jenson Button - all of whom were racing in cars with Renault engines.
Upon being rebranded as the Renault F1 Team for the 2000 Formula 1 season, the team had a string of very strong performances and several world championship titles under their most prolific driver yet, Fernando Alonso. Ricciardo move, then, could be fuelled by the hopes that his new team are poised for a similar resurgence.
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