McLaren has ‘mechanisms’ that could end Daniel Ricciardo’s F1 deal early
McLaren CEO Zak Brown has hinted there are “mechanisms” within Daniel Ricciardo’s F1 contract that could allow for an early break in his deal.
Upon making the switch from Renault to McLaren, Ricciardo signed a three-year deal that, in theory, will keep him at the Woking outfit until the end of the 2023 season.
The Australian finds himself under increasing pressure after a difficult start to life at McLaren, with Brown recently admitting that Ricciardo’s performances have not met the team’s expectations.
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Ricciardo accepted Brown’s claim as being “pretty true" but the eight-time grand prix winner insisted he remains confident he can turn things around.
“I don’t want to get into the contract, but there are mechanisms in which we’re committed to each other, and mechanisms in which we’re not,” Brown said in Monaco.
“I spoke with Daniel about it. We’re not getting the results that we both hoped for, but we’re both going to continue to push.
“I think he showed in Monza [last year] he can win races. We also need to develop our race car; it’s not capable of winning races. But we’d like to see him further up the grid.
“And we’ll see how things develop and what he wants to do. And then we’ve got our testing programme ramping up, but we’re in no rush.”
Ricciardo’s misery continues in Monaco
Ricciardo’s tough start to the 2022 season continued on Friday when he crashed at the swimming pool during his first flying lap of second practice.
It marked the first crash of the weekend and acted as a setback to Ricciardo’s preparations on a weekend where his teammate Lando Norris once again appears to hold the advantage, despite still recovering from tonsillitis.
As a result of the damage picked up on his car, Ricciardo has only had one hour of running so far this weekend, leaving him with one final 60 minute session on Saturday ahead of the all-important qualifying.
Ricciardo described the crash as “strange” but conceded he had pushed his set-up too far ahead of the incident.
"We can bounce back"
— Formula 1 (@F1) May 27, 2022
Danny Ric was disappointed about his FP2 crash but remains upbeat about his and @McLarenF1's chances at the weekend #MonacoGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/HCNiuDbMdE
“It was strange,” he said. “I think if anyone crashes there you normally see on the exit if they take maybe too much curb at Turn 14 and then lose the car. I already started losing the car pretty much before Turn 13. We pushed it too much with a few things with set-up.
“We had a good morning and obviously you try a few things for FP2, try to maximise a bit more performance but let’s say we overstepped it and you don’t know until you try.
“It was my first lap, so I couldn’t really get much of a read, it obviously happened straight away. I’m OK, and the boys and girls have some work to do tonight but it’s OK.
“We’ll come back tomorrow, it’s a little bit of a shame but I’m still confident. I had a good feeling this morning so I can recover and we as a team can too.”
