'He Is Back': Red Bull Team Principal Praises Ricciardo For Mexico City Grand Prix Performance

Monday, 30 October 2023 at 23:30

Red Bull Racing F1 team principal Christian Horner commented on the "outstanding" performance of AlphaTauri driver Daniel Ricciardo at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.

Daniel Ricciardo shocked everybody in the paddock when he achieved a P4 in the Qualifying for the 2023 Mexico City Grand Prix, beating Mercedes, McLaren driver, and Sergio Perez on Red Bull.

Following up on a great qualifying performance, the Honey Badger finished the race on Sunday in P7. By scoring 6 points for the seventh place, Ricciardo lifted AlphaTauri from the last place in the Championship.

Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner showed he was pleasantly surprised to see the Australian back at the top of his game. He told the media after the race:

"It is great to see Daniel performing so well and fully endorses the reason why we brought him back into the AlphaTauri."

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Ricciardo caught up with George Russell in the sixth place during the last two laps of the race. However, he needed one or two more laps to be able to overtake the Mercedes driver.

"I thought he was outstanding this weekend, fighting Mercedes in an AlphaTauri - and if it were not for the red flag, he'd have finished higher up, so it was a great performance and certainly looked like the Daniel of old this weekend."

The qualifying result by itself spoke for Ricciardo when he beat one of the Red Bull drivers on supposedly a lot faster car and finished just one-tenth behind the Championship winner - Max Verstappen.

"Look at the time delta to Max, it was less than a tenth so a remarkable performance by him.

The Australian driver mentioned he would be even happier for the P6 or P5. Nevertheless, P7 is an outstanding result. Horner concluded:

"He's back to his old self, you can see he is relaxed, he's confident and he came into the weekend fully motivated after a tricky Austin coming back from injury. I thought he did a great job this weekend."