Daniel Ricciardo rated his poor debut season with McLaren, saying that he wasn’t at his best throughout the year.
Ricciardo finished eighth in the Drivers’ Championship. He was second-best at McLaren as well, having routinely been outperformed by teammate Lando Norris across Saturdays and Sundays.
Norris outqualified his Australian counterpart 14 times and beat him 15 times on race days. Never has the Honey Badger been so comprehensively second-best, and he was the first one to acknowledge it.
Ricciardo rated his poor debut season with McLaren, and scored it quite low for his standards.
“I’ll give you a score, but I’ll say it sucks giving yourself a low grade because I’ve actually put a lot of effort in,” he said, as quoted by Formula1news.co.uk.
“So if I say, like, three, it comes across like I haven’t tried. But it hasn’t been without trying – the first part of the season is probably a four, the second part a seven.”
The lessons we learned
The 32-year-old driver proceeded to say that although the season wasn’t as good, he took a lot more learnings than he had from any other.
“What’s been good this year is I never really knew what, let’s say, my strengths were,” he said.
“Okay, yes, I’m fast, but why am I fast? Where am I fast? In a way, this year the weaknesses also exposed to me what my strengths are. That was quite interesting.”
The ever-smiling 2021 Italian GP winner also insisted on the importance of being positive and optimistic during the bad times.
“You wouldn’t think in like, let’s call it bad times or a bad year, you would discover something good about yourself.”
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