Did Ricciardo forget how to drive fast? 🏎️

Nyck de Vries hasn't been doing well at AlphaTauri. He's been dropped without making it through half his first season. Ouch.

Back comes Daniel Ricciardo, who's had an "interesting" career. After Vettel won four championships with Red Bull, Ricciardo was his new team mate and beat him. Promising start. He beat Verstappen in the first two seasons they were team mates. Then he didn't beat him, and chose to leave Red Bull.

Drivers go to a midfield team thinking it's about to make big steps forward. Sometimes this works. Usually (and in Ricciardo's case) there's disappointment instead. His team mate at McLaren, Lando Norris, made him look pretty bad, and he was dropped.

So how does a driver who looked so good end up looking so bad? What Ricciardo said he struggled with was inconsistency. A driver wants to be confident that the car will behave predictably; that it will do the same as it did on previous laps. You can't be on the limit of grip if you need to leave space for something unexpected to happen.

So will the AlphaTauri car give him what he wants? If he doesn't beat his team mate, Yuki Tsunoda, he could be following Nyck de Vries out of F1.

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