The F1 Championship lands in Budapest, Hungary for round 12 of the season. The Hungaroring is a 2.722 mile long course that will host a 70 lap race. Over the years the races at the Hungaroring have been action packed and filled with ever changing team strategy calls. This weekend also marks a return of a familiar face. Daniel Ricciardo will start his stent with AlphaTauri this weekend. Ricciardo who is the reserve driver at Red Bull took the seat from Nyck De Vries. De Vries had not performed at the level the team expected in the first 11 rounds of the season.
Ricciardo’s return sparked a frenzy across the internet and fans are excited to see Ricciardo grid up again in F1. Ricciardo is naturally ecstatic about his return, “It’s good, it’s really good!” Ricciardo said to F1.com. “I enjoyed this… Call it six months off – I think it was really good for me. But the more races I started to attend, the more sim I started to do, I was certainly getting the bug back, so to speak. Then jumping into the car a few days ago, I was like, ‘Oh yeah!’, it all felt very normal. It was one of those ones, the very first lap, ‘Oh, this is fast!’, then within a few it’s, ‘OK, I want to go faster now!’, so it was really good.”
Ricciardo Continued
“Getting back to Red Bull and just kind of the reception I had walking back into that team was really kind of, in a positive way, a little bit overwhelming. Then getting back on the sim, I was still a bit unsure how it was going to go, if the car would feel like it used to, if I was going to be, for the lack of better words, like the old me. Once I’d done a few sim sessions and started feeling like myself again, it then just kind of brought me back to normal Daniel, where I was falling back in love and ready to go again.”
In an interview with F1.com, Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner stated, “He [Ricciardo] firmly wants to be pitching for that 2025 Red Bull seat – that’s his objective. By going to AlphaTauri, I think he sees that as his best route of stating his case for 2025.”
The move was welcomed by AlphaTauri fans. The team sits at the bottom of the table with just 2 points to its name. If there was an opportunity for Ricciardo to make a statement. That opportunity would be finishing in the points this weekend in Hungary. The honey badger is back!