After 4 Years of Uncertain Suffering, Daniel Ricciardo Reminisces His Old Fire at Red Bull With a Dose of Nostalgia: “do it to prove it”

The golden boy of Red Bull has returned home after four years of exile filled with ridiculously testing times. Having seen the darkest times last season, the doors to the home were opened for Daniel Ricciardo at Milton Keynes as a third driver. But what has turned out even better for him is the pampering from management, which is treating the honey badger no less than the main drivers, apart from racing, of course.

During the Australian GP, this treatment reached a new high, where Ricciardo was spotted on the pit wall. However, it was left behind as this time Daniel Ricciardo went to the team’s museum, where he was filled with joy and happiness over seeing his first Red Bull car that won him three GPs. It was the same RB10 in which he outscored his teammate and then-defending champion, Sebastian Vettel.

After disappointing four-year-long stints away from home, and reminiscing on his glorious days at Red Bull, Ricciardo sent all of us down memory lane as he talked about his first GP win. Talking about the 2014 Canadian GP, where he started P6, Ricciardo says, “I remember Canada, like, remember everything. Yeah, I remember the briefing after qualifying that night; I was pissed with myself more than anything. Nothing really was going that well for me on that Saturday. And then the next day was pretty awesome. All the things that made me upset about the qualifying that day was just because I believed that I belonged further up the front.”

“So it just kind of fueled me for the next day. But it was like positive anger. It’s all well good and saying something and looking at yourself in the mirror and believing it, but you still have to do it to prove it. And crossing the line. It was that it was like, okay, I can do this, you know.”

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Seeing Ricciardo at Red Bull fills the fans with a different hope, as they still see the fire inside the honey badger. Will he ever get a real chance in the Red Bull again? It’s hard to say so.

How did Daniel Ricciardo imagine his first win to be?

Winning in F1 is a feeling that only a few drivers have felt in history. Of the 774 starters on Sunday, only 113 have been lucky enough to stand on top of the podium. Daniel Ricciardo has done so eight times. But his first one didn’t come until his fourth season in the sport. Till then, he says, he had just imagined the beautiful scenario.

He says, “Then on the podium, it was like it was an image I’d seen before. It was like, you picture, like, your first win, and you picture being up there hearing your anthem and seeing the crowd of people, the sea of people. And I remember getting up on the top step and looking down, and it’s like, oh, this is actually what I did. It was all as I thought it would be. Good times.”

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Indeed, they were good times for Ricciardo. Hopefully, he rebuilds himself, prepares for next year or whenever the opportunity arises, and shows what he truly is capable of.