A few weeks ago, the Formula 1 star Daniel Ricciardo flew from his home base in Monaco to New York. Among the many perks of driving for the McLaren F1 team, as Ricciardo does, is a killer rental car policy: No matter where Ricciardo travels in the world, McLaren can usually get him a papaya-accented supercar to drive for a few days. In New York, though, the 32-year-old Aussie gets around like the rest of us.
“I don’t want to drive in New York. It’s just too hectic!” Ricciardo says. We’re at the Odeon in Tribeca on a sunny spring afternoon. Ricciardo arrived in an Uber. Imagine driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 180 miles-per-hour—that’s basically the start of an F1 race. But Ricciardo doesn’t feel quite so comfortable in normal commuter traffic. “Tight spaces on the street, it's so different,” says Ricciardo, flashing his trademark double-decker grin.
New York traffic is pretty bad, I concede, but shouldn’t one of the best Formula 1 drivers in the world be able to hold his own? “In the race car, we know we can bump and touch and it's like, you're kind of alright,” he says. Owing to his reputation for fearlessness on the track, Ricciardo is known as the “Honey Badger,” and in his eleven-year career, the Honey Badger has had his fair share of heart-pounding crashes and shunts. None of which, he points out, resulted in drivers exchanging insurance information. “There are too many formalities on the road,” Ricciardo says. “I don't want that stress.”
Ricciardo might not like driving in New York, but he loves America, and America loves him back. When he walks into the Odeon, it’s like Jeff Gordon has just entered a Hardee’s. The restaurant is heaving with lawyers and bankers in their mid-30s, the exact demographic and tax bracket that—thanks to F1’s push into the great untapped market that is America—has become obsessed with the most elite series in motorsport. One man’s jaw drops mid-bite as Ricciardo passes by. The noise level in the room seems to drop several notches as diners lean in to whisper about the McLaren star to their lunch dates. A dude wearing a gingham shirt comes over to wish Ricciardo good luck at the following weekend’s race, the inaugural Miami Grand Prix.
“The sport is going berserk at the moment,” Ricciardo says as he eyeballs his Patagonia-vested fans. A few years ago, Formula 1 ranked somewhere below cricket in terms of interest in niche Euro-centric pastimes among Americans. And then Netflix dropped the blockbuster F1 docu-series Drive to Survive, which introduced the shockingly loud and insanely fast racing series to a new generation. It also turned the men behind the helmets into real-life heroes—none more so than Ricciardo. Thanks to his good-natured Australian personality and aggressive driving style, he became an instant favorite among America’s newly-rabid fanbase.
In Miami, Ricciardo would finish in 13th after a poor qualifying round and a late five-second penalty. After missing pre-season testing due to covid, the eight-time grand prix winner has only cracked the top 10 in one race so far. Not that you could tell looking at the spectacle surrounding him in Miami, where he recorded a spot with James Corden, hung out with the likes of Paris Hilton and DJ Khaled, appeared in what felt like hours of promo material, and was at the center of a full-blown mob every time he walked around the paddock. According to Ricciardo, he had more requests for his time in Miami than at his home race in Melbourne.
“It’s escalated real quick,” he says. America hasn’t had a bona fide Formula 1 star since Mario Andretti won the world championship in 1978, and with a third stateside race joining the calendar next year (Vegas, baby!), the sport is aching for an American driver who can boost its promotion in the US to new heights. F1’s new American fans, though, aren’t exactly clamoring for a homegrown talent, because they’ve already chosen Ricciardo as their superstar.
Even more than other athletes, Formula 1 drivers tend to be a superstitious crowd. Take enough blind corners at 190 miles per hour in a jet-powered bathtub on wheels and you might want luck on your side, too. The Mexican driver Sergio Pérez reportedly races with a picture of Pope John Paul II taped to the inside of his car. The former world champion Sebastian Vettel laces lucky silver coins into his race boots. Many drivers enter their cars on the same side every single time.
Not Ricciardo. “I fucking hate superstitions,” he says when I ask him if he has any pre-race rituals. “Superstitions don't hold you accountable. I go have a shit race and I'm like, Oh, fuck, is it because I put my left sock on before my right one? Well, no, that's just an excuse. You didn't race well, because you didn't race well.”
Ricciardo’s appeal to the producers of Drive to Survive and, in turn, their audience of newly-minted F1 fanatics is pretty straightforward: he’s a hard-charging, fun-loving Australian dude in a sport filled with awkward 20-year-olds, jaded veterans, and rich weirdos. Born in Perth to a middle-class Sicilian-Australian family, Ricciardo’s background is more NASCAR than Formula 1. His dad, who runs an earthmoving company, was a weekend warrior racer, and introduced his son to karting at the age of 9. When young Danny got his karting license, he was assigned the racing number 3–the number of his favorite racer, Dale Earnhardt, which Ricciardo keeps to this day. (He is a huge American sports fan, and, for some reason, roots for the Buffalo Bills.)
Ricciardo is the very first person new Drive to Survive viewers meet. “I’m Daniel Ricciardo, and I’m a car mechanic,” he jokes in the show’s opening sequence. Even before Drive to Survive runs through Ricciardo’s torrid come-from-behind victory at the 2014 Hungarian Grand Prix, it feels hard to not root for him. “Everyone gravitates towards Danny because he's got this large smile, and he takes the sport seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously,” says the fashion designer Rhuigi Villaseñor, who first met Ricciardo at the 2017 Mexican Grand Prix. “For anyone getting into the sport of Formula 1, he’s easy to relate to. He’s a guy you want to drink wine with, and also play beer pong with.”
What Villaseñor means is Ricciardo’s a man of taste, with a closet full of Gucci and Louis Vuitton, a garage full of expensive cars, and creative ambitions—like his own line of Daniel Ricciardo-branded merch—off the track. But he also reminds you, maybe, of your college buddies. When Ricciardo scores a podium finish, he tends to celebrate by performing the Australian pub trick known as a “shoey.” Which is exactly what it sounds like: Ricciardo pulls off his sweat-soaked racing boot, fills it up with celebratory champagne, and gulps down the foamy mixture to thunderous cheers.
When Drive to Survive was first filming, the two top teams on the grid, Mercedes and Ferrari, refused to participate in the series, meaning millions of new fans were introduced to the sport through the guy who drinks champagne out of his shoes rather than through, say, defending world champion Lewis Hamilton. “With the first season, I was happy to give a bit of time, and I was excited about the project,” says Ricciardo. It paid off: Netflix has rewarded Ricciardo with dedicated episodes and storylines in all four seasons of the show, while other drivers complain about lack of screen time on the sport’s most valuable promotional tool. (They also complain, Ricciardo hints, about a lack of compensation.) There was no strategy on his part, Ricciardo says: “I was just being me, and letting them in a bit. I think that encouraged [Netflix] to run with it.”
Strategy or not, Ricciardo’s comfort in front of the camera has proven to be a major asset in the cutthroat driver market, even when he’s underperformed his world championship-winning potential. “We knew when we brought Daniel in that he was more than just an incredible racing driver, he also has a long-standing connection with F1 fans all around the world,” says McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown, who hired Ricciardo away from Renault in 2020. “Netflix has provided a huge platform which has raised both Daniel’s popularity as an athlete, and also of our sport overall. Fans are at the center of our world at McLaren Racing, and it’s important we have drivers who connect and engage them.”
At the start of the 2021 season, Ricciardo was riding high. After two years driving an uncompetitive Renault, he was debuting with a surging McLaren team and looking like a threat to win races once again. But once he got on track, he couldn’t figure out how to tame the unfamiliar new car. Though Ricciardo managed to score a decent tally of points (awarded for top-ten finishes), his Gen-Z teammate Lando Norris beat him in nine of the first ten races of the season. “Obviously your teammate's your biggest rival, and you're both trying to, in the nicest way possible, end each other's careers,” Ricciardo says. Getting lapped by Norris at the 2021 Monaco Grand Prix, a race Ricciardo heroically won in 2018, was his F1 equivalent of hitting rock bottom. He was struggling, in other words, to live up to the hype. His on-track frustrations, Ricciardo says, bled into the rest of his life: He was bristling at publicity commitments, and was too stressed to enjoy his weeks off. He even found himself questioning whether he loved F1 anymore.
The rigors of the modern Formula 1 media machine didn’t help. F1 drivers can’t just be drivers anymore. Go to the McLaren YouTube channel and you’ll find videos of Ricciardo and Norris unboxing a to-scale Lego version of their race car, playing each other in ping pong, or doing something called “snack wars.” If you ignored the race highlights, you’d think the teammates were simply a pair of charismatic content creators. “In the last two to three years, it's gone to a point where I would say driving is 20% of our job. It's nuts,” Ricciardo says.
Ricciardo recalls one particularly trying weekend in 2019, at his home grand prix in Australia, where he spent most of the leadup to the race in PR commitments, social media sessions, and fan events. “By Sunday, I was fucked,” he says. He was leveraging his fame in all the ways a modern celebrity athlete is supposed to. But it caught up with him. When the race began, he ran onto the grass, obliterated the front wing of his car, and had to drop out after some twenty painful laps.
Ricciardo has since tried to balance his weekends, but the spotlight is unavoidable—and all the more harsh when you’re not performing. “Last year, McLaren had two videographers,” Ricciardo says. “Now they have four, and nearly every race there’s someone new to the content team. It’s a lot.” Privacy has always been in short supply on race weekends, but now it’s practically nonexistent, Ricciardo says: “What I’ve noticed now is unless you’re sitting in your room with your door closed, someone’s filming you. You just don’t get space anymore.”
But Ricciardo also had to hold himself accountable for what was becoming a disastrous season. “I wrestled a lot last year with the questions of, like, Was this the right call, in terms of moving teams again? Why is it not clicking? Is there something holding me back that I'm not aware of?” he says. Doubt, the closest thing F1 drivers have to kryptonite, began creeping into his mind. “I suddenly feel some fear: Am I not willing to risk it anymore? Like, what's going on?”
Rather than return to Monaco for the 2021 summer break, Ricciardo went to L.A., where he knew he wouldn’t run into any other drivers. He rode motorbikes at a friend’s ranch and went surfing and did everything he could to unload the stress that had been building up over the course of the season. “I just completely switched off. Like, I didn't think about racing. And I tried to just have some real me time, and I tried to just get back to basics,” he says. Nothing short of his career was at stake. Ricciardo needed to figure out, as he put it, “what I was going to do to make me really love F1 again, and really want to race and compete and be the best I can be.”
Come fall, Ricciardo arrived at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza, the home race of McLaren arch-rival Ferrari. He wasn’t the same driver that had been getting beaten down all spring. “I got into the second part of the season,” Ricciardo recalls, “with a bit of a more carefree attitude.” His plan was simple, and fit for the Honey Badger: “Let's just go and race, have fun. Go be a badass and don’t overthink shit,” he told himself.
So far that season, 11 of the previous 13 races had been won by either Hamilton or eventual champion Max Verstappen. Nobody thought Ricciardo would win a single race. Hell, he didn’t even think he had it in him.
And then he qualified for the grand prix in second. And then he passed the leader, Verstappen, going into the first turn of the race. Coming out of turn two, you couldn’t tell, but Ricciardo was grinning widely behind his helmet. Still, nobody expected Ricciardo to actually end up in first. He didn’t either—at least not yet. But after he held off Verstappen for the first stint of the race, Ricciardo began to believe in himself again. “I was like, ‘No one's taking this race from me.’” After a clean pit stop, Ricciardo’s belief hardened into certainty. “You have these moments where you really feel undeniable. There’s this kind of conviction and fight,” he explains. “As soon as we did the pit stop, I was like, No chance someone's beating me today. It's just not going to happen.”
What happened next, of course, was the endpoint of a redemption arc so perfect that Drive to Survive spent half a season winding it up: Ricciardo won, leading Norris in a one-two McLaren finish. On the podium, he did a fat shoey, his first in nearly a year. What the cameras didn’t get to see was what happened next: Daniel Ricciardo, too exhausted to hit the town in celebration, lying in the bed of his motorhome, staring at the ceiling and giggling like he was a kid who just won a karting trophy.
“The year was tough,” he says. “But the win confirmed a lot to myself. There were moments I wasn't sure if I loved the sport anymore, that sort of stuff, and after the win I was like, No, this shit means way too much to me. I proved it today. I proved I can still do it.”
In that rare and beautiful moment of privacy, Ricciardo started feeling something he hadn’t felt in a long time: “Good, positive, wavy emotions,” as he puts it. “I don't want to say I was crying, but I nearly could've cried of happiness.”