Racing Bulls’ Peter Bayer and Alan Permane have opened up on the struggles of Daniel Ricciardo in the F1 2024 season, prior to him being replaced by Liam Lawson.

The Australian driver is out of Formula 1, perhaps for good, following the VCARB’s team’s decision to replace him in their driver line-up for the final six races of the F1 2024 championship.

Peter Bayer offers theory on Daniel Ricciardo’s struggles

With the Racing Bulls team moving on with the line-up of Yuki Tsunoda and Isack Hadjar for F1 2025, Ricciardo has gone to ground since being replaced at the team after last season’s Singapore Grand Prix.

The Australian had struggled to consistently match the pace of Tsunoda and, aside from one or two flashes of speed, failed to show the kind of form that would indicate he had recovered back to being his ‘old’ self.

Ricciardo had been regarded as one of F1’s top talents during his time at Red Bull until 2018, a reputation that remained intact during two years at Renault in 2019 and ’20. But an ill-fated move to McLaren in 2021 saw Ricciardo begin to struggle, to the point where he was frequently at the tail end of the pack by the end of 2022.

But Red Bull offered him a lifeline with a reserve driver job and, following a strong Pirelli tyre test with the RB19 in 2023, brought Ricciardo back in place of the struggling Nyck de Vries.

A little over 12 months later, Ricciardo’s own journey came to an apparent end – the Australian hasn’t confirmed he’s no longer interested in Formula 1, although video footage recently emerged of him telling a fan “Nah, I’m done” in response to the fan asking if he would be interested in moving to Cadillac when the American team enters Formula 1 next season.

Speaking to PlanetF1.com, Racing Bulls CEO Peter Bayer opened up on Ricciardo’s travails alongside Tsunoda during 2024, with the Austrian asked whether he believes Ricciardo still has something to offer in Formula 1.

“Yes, of course,” he replied.

“I think all of these guys have something to offer.

“Whether he wants it, I really don’t know. I don’t think that he is considering a comeback, certainly not yet.”

Given the optimism around Ricciardo following the success of his Red Bull test at Silverstone in the middle of 2023, was Bayer surprised that the eight-time Grand Prix winner struggled so much to re-find the form that marked him out so much only a few years prior?

“I’m just actually thinking back to a conversation I had with Franz [Tost, former Toro Rosso/AlphaTauri team boss] last year after Abu Dhabi [2023],” Bayer said.

“Abu Dhabi, we brought, for the first time last year, a new generation floor, which was really like going into the extreme of these ground-effect cars and we had the same floor on both cars.

“Yuki loved it. Daniel was struggling with it.

“Franz then actually said, ‘I’m curious to see whether Daniel can recover with this, whether this new type of car will suit him’.

“I think now, in hindsight, probably he was struggling with this generation of cars. They are just a different way of driving. I think, whilst the driver can always adapt, this year was so close – sometimes we’ve seen 20 cars within a second.”

Ricciardo’s stand-out performance of F1 2024 was undoubtedly his Sprint race showing in Miami, where he qualified and raced to fourth place – holding off Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz in the process – but, just hours later, he was more than half a second slower in qualifying and was knocked out in Q1.

“Adapting is one thing, mastering it is another thing,” Bayer said.

“We saw Canada was an amazing performance. Miami was an amazing performance in the [Sprint] race. He did an outstanding job. And then, three hours later in qualifying, he was nowhere.

“I think he didn’t have that breakthrough moment, where he was like, ‘Okay, I got it. This is what I need to do. This is the setup that suits me’.

“They’d been trying a ton of things, because, ultimately, it’s down to the team to give the driver the car that he needs, but, yeah, they struggled.”

More on Daniel Ricciardo in Formula 1

👉 Daniel Ricciardo net worth: How much is F1’s ‘Honey Badger’ worth?

👉 What happened to Daniel Ricciardo? The compelling theories to explain his sharp F1 decline

Alan Permane: Daniel Ricciardo didn’t know what the problem was

Racing Bulls racing director Alan Permane worked closely alongside Ricciardo during their overlap at the Italian squad in 2024, with Permane having swapped to Faenza following his departure from Renault in 2023.

Permane had been at Enstone during Ricciardo’s two years with the team, and explained how he could see a difference between 2024-spec and 2019-spec Ricciardo.

“The Daniel I knew when we were at Renault together, it all just came very easily for him,” he said.

“He came in and was very quickly up to speed. He was fast in qualifying, fast in the race, and did everything, as always, with a smile on his face, and managed to achieve a couple of podiums along the way with Renault.

“It certainly was tricky for him here [at Racing Bulls], and it’s odd because he’d have outstanding weekends like Miami, where he qualified fourth for the sprint, and I think he finished fourth in the sprint. It just looked like ‘Ah, here we go’ and then, that afternoon, he qualified 18th for the main race.”

As for what the problem exactly was, Permane said he didn’t have any theories.

“I don’t know what it was and, if I did, I’m sure we’d have worked on it together and fixed it, and he doesn’t know what it was,” he said.

“There’s an inconsistency, or a struggling with the tyres, or whatever it is, I don’t know.

“But for Yuki to be able to take the same car and deliver reasonably consistently, I know it was very frustrating for Daniel.”

Permane was complimentary of Ricciardo’s efforts to rectify the situation, revealing the Australian had never pointed back at the team or the car as being the issue.

“We spent a lot of time pouring over data, and, certainly with his race engineers, he handled it incredibly professionally, just looking at himself the whole time,” he said.

“We would constantly, of course, make sure the car was performing as it should have been, but Daniel would spend time, with his engineers, just seeing how he could improve, and what he could do better.

“I know he was as frustrated as anyone to not be able to deliver.”

Read Next: Verstappen’s ‘full McLaren report’ quip after axed F1 star’s surprise test