Daniel Ricciardo had Sebastian Vettel pretty much under control in parts of their 2014 Red Bull season together – Christian Horner has an idea why that was.
Sebastian Vettel undoubtedly had the more successful Formula One career than Daniel Ricciardo. During his time in the premier class, the German won 53 races and, above all, four world championship titles. Ricciardo, on the other hand, “only” achieved eight victories and never became world champion.
Nevertheless, the Australian was ahead in 2014, when the two competed together for Red Bull for a year. He took three victories and won the internal duel 238:167 World Championship points, while Vettel remained completely winless.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has now revealed in the F1 Nation podcast what “advantage” Ricciardo, who was new to the team at the time, had over Vettel. “We switched from V8 to V6 engines,” he recalls of the major rule change at the time.
From 2010 to 2013, Vettel and Red Bull had won the World Championship four times in a row, but in 2014, the car had “a different characteristic,” explains Horner, and reveals: “When you come to Formula 1, you get a huge amount of information.”
Horner: Young drivers “just adapt”
“Everyone analyzes how hard you brake, where you brake, when you brake, your driving style, your position, the energy you put into the tires, all these elements,” says Horner, adding: “The young guys seem to have the ability to adapt very quickly.”
His guess: “Because they’re not spoiled by other prejudices about what a car should be, they just adapt and drive the thing fast, which is exactly what Daniel did in 2014.”
Ricciardo had also been driving in Formula 1 since the middle of the 2011 season before his rise to Red Bull. However, in two and a half years at HRT and Toro Rosso, respectively, he never sat in an absolute top car – unlike the then reigning world champion Vettel.
The Red Bull, often referred to as a “rail car” at the time, underwent some changes due to the new regulations for 2014, “which made the car a bit more nervous at the corner entry,” recalls Horner, who suspects that Vettel had more problems with it.
“[Daniel] very quickly got the upper hand against Sebastian in 2014 and was able to cope with the [more nervous car] much better than Seb,” said Horner. This was because, unlike Vettel, Ricciardo lacked direct experience of the world championship-winning cars of previous years.
Ricciardo now replaced by younger driver
It was to be the only season together for the two, because in 2015, Vettel left for Ferrari, where he then returned to winning ways himself and was runner-up to Lewis Hamilton twice more in 2017 and 2018.
Ricciardo himself remained loyal to Red Bull until the end of the 2018 season, before he too left the team for Renault. In 2023, he returned to the Red Bull family (initially as a reserve driver), but in Singapore he drove what was probably his last race for the sister team Racing Bulls.
Horner explains: “Perhaps as their careers progress, [drivers] are less willing to drive not-so-great cars or cars with defects because they always compare them to the better cars they’ve already had.”
“It’s hard to say, but the young guys coming through are hungry and they go flat out. And that’s what we see in all the juniors coming through at the moment,” said the Red Bull team principal.
The very “advantage” that the Australian had over Vettel in 2014 may now have become a problem for Ricciardo himself. The now 35-year-old lost his cockpit at the Racing Bulls to Liam Lawson, who is 13 years younger.
