Daniel Ricciardo on Thursday appeared to directly attribute the slump in his career over the past two seasons at McLaren to the Woking based team.
Dr. Helmut Marko, a senior figure at Red Bull, deemed his decision to replace Nyck de Vries at junior team Alpha Tauri with Ricciardo as “perfect.”
The Australian driver, now 33, attributes this success to the receptive environment at the Faenza based team, where they paid attention to his engineering preferences and allowed him to drive naturally.
“They just let me do it with my natural driving style,” Ricciardo stated as per Auto Motor und Sport.
He further explained, “I noticed that they were curious and wanted to hear my opinion in the briefings. I was able to give them some new food for thought, but I didn’t want to overload them with a 100 things over the first weekend.”
His impressive performance even secured him the pole position for Sergio Perez’s race seat at the main Red Bull team, as he outperformed his new teammate Yuki Tsunoda in Hungary.
The implication from Ricciardo’s remarks about Alpha Tauri is that McLaren’s engineers may not have been as receptive to his input.
“I don’t really want to talk about the time at McLaren anymore,” he expressed.
“But back then, during the first summer break, I realized that we were going about things the wrong way, although obviously everyone was acting in the team’s best interest.
“But, looking back, you’d have to say that we probably just did too much.”
