Villeneuve Backs Renault Move for Ricciardo

Jacques Villeneuve has struck again. The explosive Canadian believes that the decision by Daniel Ricciardo to move to Renault for 2019 will be vindicated by the failure of the Red Bull-Honda partnership next season.

Ricciardo shocked everyone by announcing the move last week, baffling Red Bull too, who had made all arrangements to make the news of a new deal public. But it was not to be.

But the Australian has received the support of 1997 champion, Villeneuve. “Everyone thought he was staying at Red Bull, but it’s great that he’s going to Renault. It’s a factory team with great resources”, he told Journal de Montreal.

“The cooperation of Red Bull and Honda is not credible. Red Bull is also Max Verstappen’s team in the sense that all the attention is on him. I’ve been talking about this for a month, but no one believed me”, he claimed.

There may be some element of truth to this latest opinion of Villeneuve, who is not very popular with F1 drivers because of his criticisms of them at various points this season.

Honda did not have a great return to F1 in 2015, failing horribly with McLaren, relegating them to a backmarker car and frustrating the highly ambitious Fernando Alonso no end.

To please their star driver, McLaren moved to Renault engines for this season, with Toro Rosso announcing their partnership with Honda. That has been fruitful with the reliability being good and even enabled the team to earn some points.

Red Bull admitted that they had taken the decision of moving to Honda after studying their data and performance with their sister team, Toro Rosso. Verstappen also visited their factory and was positive about it.

However, they’ll be having the headache of securing a partner for Verstappen in 2019. It seems to be a straight shoot-out between their academy graduates, Carlos Sainz Jr. and Pierre Gasly.