Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner believes that Daniel Ricciardo will “bounce back” from his struggles during the nascent stages of the 2024 Formula 1 season.
Ricciardo has endured a challenging start to the current campaign, where he has lagged behind less experienced team-mate Yuki Tsunoda in each of the four rounds.
While Tsunoda has bagged three Q3 appearances and two consecutive points scores, Ricciardo has failed to register one point and has a Q1 exit at home to his name.
That’s triggered rumours that Ricciardo could be dropped for Liam Lawson, who deputised for the Australian last term when he was sidelined with a broken metacarpal.
However, such speculation has since been dampened, with Horner adamant that Ricciardo will recover from his woes to avoid a repeat of his ill-fated McLaren period.
“His team-mate is delivering and that naturally then puts pressure on you,” Horner admitted. “But he’s been there before. I’m sure he’ll bounce back.”
Horner has concurred with Ricciardo’s words that the eight-time grand prix winner is one breakthrough result from getting back on track in his bid to return to Red Bull.
“Daniel’s a big boy, he’s, he’s been around, he’s been around the block. He knows how things work,” Horner added.
“And I think that he just needs to get good result in the bag, and then that smile will return.”
Ricciardo’s attempts to build on reducing his one-lap pace deficit to Tsunoda to 0.055 seconds at Suzuka in the race were curtailed on the first lap due to a collision.
The RB driver had failed to spot an optimistic Alex Albon sweeping around the outside on the approach to Turn 3, with the pair colliding and ending up in the barrier.
“I think today is a singular moment, I guess in terms of I don’t look at today and think oh man this year, like when it rains, it pours, or whatever,” Ricciardo expressed.
“I feel it was just one of those things. We know that 24 races, it’s probably likely that maybe I’m involved in another lap one incident, you know, it’s just, it’s just probability in that.
“So these things kind of happen. It obviously sucks when they do, but I don’t look at it any more than today, being a kind of singular incident.
“Of course, would have been nice to get a race under our belt and tried to show a little bit of something that I felt we were starting to show yesterday.”
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