Horner picks his favourite Ricciardo Red Bull races as he names year where the Australian was ‘best driver on the grid’

Christian Horner has been reflecting on Daniel Ricciardo’s strongest races from his five-year stint as a Red Bull driver, with the team boss even suggesting that the Australian was the “best driver on the grid” during his debut season with the squad in 2014.

Following two years with the then-named Toro Rosso outfit, Ricciardo made the step up to replace the retiring Mark Webber at the main team – and quickly made an impression by outperforming world champion team mate Sebastian Vettel for much of the campaign.

READ MORE: Horner hopes to keep ‘brilliant character’ Ricciardo in Red Bull family as he hints at F1 lifeline for the Australian

From there Ricciardo went on to score seven of his eight F1 wins with Red Bull, ranging from his first at the 2014 Canadian Grand Prix through to a dramatic victory in Monaco four years later.

When asked during an appearance on the F1 Nation podcast about the best race that Ricciardo ever drove for the team, Horner answered: “He drove some brilliant races for us. I’m not going to name one, I’m going to name a couple.

“Monaco [in 2018], when the dear old Renault engine dropped its MGU-K, so he’s dropped about 30 per cent of his power, and he just got the combustion engine to fend off Sebastian Vettel.

“Having lost the race a couple of years prior to that – when we screwed up by not having the right tyres in the pit lane for him – that was an incredible moment, and that just felt like the universe is correcting itself by him achieving that win.”

Looking back at Ricciardo’s first season with Red Bull, Horner admits that the squad were unsure about his overtaking skills – only to quickly have their concerns allayed when the driver from Perth started racing for the team.

READ MORE: How one-of-a-kind Ricciardo left a permanent mark on F1 – both on and off the track

“I think that some of the races, if you look at Hungary 2014… Our biggest concern when he came to drive for us was that we knew he was quick, but [we’d] never seen him overtake anybody, so we didn’t know how good a racer he was,” Horner explained.

“As soon as he got in our car, he just never stopped overtaking people! He was so late on the brakes. If you look at that race from 2014 in Hungary, if you look at his first victory in Montreal, the race he won in China in 2018 I think it was.

“He was outstanding in that and when his confidence was sky-high… For me, in 2014 he was the best driver on the grid – that was his high point.”

The 2014 season was also one of Ricciardo’s strongest on paper, with the now 35-year-old taking three wins as well as finishing in a career-best third in the drivers’ championship, a feat that he equalled in 2016.

READ MORE: ‘We should have done a better job’ – Team Principal Mekies admits RB ‘not happy’ with how Ricciardo exit was handled

After leaving the squad at the end of 2018, Ricciardo switched to Renault for two seasons before joining McLaren in 2021. But after a difficult spell at the Woking outfit, the Australian was left without a seat on the grid for 2023.

He then returned to the Red Bull fold as a reserve driver until he was drafted in to replace Nyck de Vries at AlphaTauri midway through the 2023 campaign.

While he was retained in 2024 at the newly-named RB, Ricciardo’s struggles to recapture his form of old saw the team replace him with Liam Lawson ahead of the final six races of the season.

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