1,000 Greatest Drivers: Daniel Ricciardo

Zak Brown's petty vendetta against Ganassi will cost him in the end.

Some thoughts on the Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist to McLaren moves after my next set of LearnedLeague matches. I wrote this before Dixon’s departure was announced, but didn’t finish the Ricciardo post until today.

I only got the second one because of Jelani Nelson, the competitive typist I displaced at #1 in 2010. He has Ethiopian heritage and launched the bootcamp AddisCoder. He told me when I interviewed him for Nerds per Minute that he obtained the username minilek from the Ethiopian emperor, and then he inverted the vowels. No way I’d have gotten that otherwise. I’d never heard of Maureen Connolly and put nothing down for that. For 4, I put “royal purple”, thinking that might be where purple prose came from. I had beaver for #5. I was thinking like beaver and badger. I don’t think that was a horrible guess, but I wasn’t thinking of reptiles. I’ve never seen L.A. Confidential. It’s something I might want to watch someday, and I know everybody calls it the “real best movie of 1997” although I doubt I’d like it more than Good Will Hunting or Wag the Dog even… I knew Kevin Spacey was in it, so that’s what I put, and that was the most common incorrect response, but it does seem they mostly try to avoid questions about canceled figures/people known to be reprehensible by the general public, so I guess I need to adjust for that.

Even though I was regularly watching the news in the years immediately after 9/11 (which I haven’t lately), I don’t remember Bagram, and I put Kandahar. Foucault was my first guess for #2, but I second-guessed myself and switched to Hubble, even though I think I knew Hubble was more recent than that. I watched Ugly Betty a little, but I didn’t particularly like it. I did memorize the Greek alphabet once but I think I’ve forgotten a lot of it and that wouldn’t have helped me probably. I put tau. And for the sixth question, I put Hitler because my interpretation of that was, “Who do the French hate the most?” I knew about Nude Descending a Staircase and his urinal “art piece”, so I wasn’t coming into that blind, but I wasn’t thinking about the idea of parodying other paintings. If I had, Mona Lisa probably would’ve come to mind.

This is the first round I ever swept. I was absolutely certain about #2 and #4. I was pretty sure about #1 and #3, but while I certainly remember the whole Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, I was worried I couldn’t remember the name of the company because I knew it was some kind of “edgy” three-letter acronym that wasn’t really an acronym and I thought I might get the letters confused, but I did remember it. I knew the U.S. conquered the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and (sort of) Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and none of the others made sense because they wouldn’t have sent 500 people to Guam. If they were going to Puerto Rico or Cuba, they wouldn’t have left from San Francisco, so that was a safe educated guess. I wasn’t completely sure the last was a music clue but how many Austrians from that era are still famous?

From 9 points to 0. Whoo. At least this is a math question a layman can get without attending graduate seminars. Never heard of bigos and put wurst. I was thinking too hard about the “New Zealand” part for question #3 and put Wellington, when I should have been thinking more about the Founding Father party. I’ve certainly heard of Hamilton, Ontario, but not the Hamiltons in the other two countries. I really don’t know much about grammatical tenses, and it seems like people possibly know more about them in foreign languages than in their own, because you need to break down the structure of other languages to learn them, but people are less inclined to do that with their own if they were fluent from early childhood. That was just a random guessing game, and I put “past perfect”. Questions 5 and 6 were also random guessing games, and I put Missouri and World.

I actually would have won this if I had set difficulty on Max Martin to 3 even though he got all the other questions. It’s unusual for your opponent to get a perfect score despite missing a question. I guess because Todd in the Shadows is my favorite YouTuber and most of the podcasts I listen to are music podcasts, pop music has become one of the easiest categories for me (and I’ve noticed this on Jeopardy! too; I guess not many people actually intentionally listened to all the top 3,000 most acclaimed songs on acclaimedmusic.net like I did once many years ago. Objectively, Martin was actually the hardest question, as people rated it substantially higher than any other question and the fewest people got it. If I had calibrated for that, I would have won. Bikini was an obvious deduction, and I think Warner Brothers is too. My dad loved self-help books like that, although I suspect if I ever tried to read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it would make me vomit profusely. And then I had two bad guesses, microbial for #3 (I’m way worse on the science questions than I expected to be, which is funny because based on my hyper-nerd image people thought I was the kind of person who had a chemistry lab in my basement like I was Steve Urkel or something) and Qatar for #5 (again, I would try and follow the news again if there was anyone I thought I could trust, but there isn’t, so I don’t). What I learned from this match is I need to assume all pop music questions are harder than I think they are and all food questions are easier than I think they are, even if I’ve almost never even heard of the food answers.

So both Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist are going to McLaren, huh? And they’re letting Christian Lundgaard go, one of two drivers who have given them wins after their return? This is weird for all sorts of reasons. Although we already saw signs of this last year when Dixon’s speed percentile was 26 points slower than Álex Palou, he now looks almost completely washed up. Lately, he’s been way closer to Kyffin Simpson than he has been to Palou, and Simpson is terrible. Rosenqvist already went winless there and was fired before. Sure, they’re still improvements over Nolan Siegel, but at this point I don’t think anyone would be very surprised if neither Dixon nor Rosenqvist ever wins a race again in their career. I’m not going to actually predict that, but it’s certainly possible, especially since McLaren does seem to have slower cars than not only Ganassi but Meyer Shank as well.

What I don’t understand is casting Lundgaard aside. He’s on the verge of being a championship contender and seems to be in the process of taking control of the team from Pato O’Ward. Marshall Pruett is claiming (and I’m much more skeptical about any of his analysis than I was about Robin Miller back in the day) that McLaren only cares about Indy 500 wins and maximizing chances to win that race only. Okay, Dixon was good at Indy this year (for the only time all season really), and Rosenqvist won, but Rosenqvist, despite having speed, really benefited from one fewer pit stop, without which he probably would not have been in the scramble for the win at the end. Palou and David Malukas were way faster than anyone else in the second half of the race, Malukas especially, who had put several seconds down on Palou as he was catching the leaders. Yes, he mistimed his last-lap pass, I guess, and gave Rosenqvist a chance to come back, but it was still a little flukish. More to the point, that was the only oval race where I can remember Rosenqvist even contending while Malukas has contended for like ten already despite not winning yet. If all you care about is Indy 500 wins, Zak, why fire Malukas after like 15 seconds before he even had a chance to make a start for you? (Although I’m glad Malukas got out of that hellhole and got something better.) Malukas almost certainly has more Indy 500 wins in his future than Dixon and Rosenqvist do, and Lundgaard has more wins overall in his future than they do, so seriously, WTF? As for Lundgaard, I admit he’s never really shown speed on ovals, and that’s been his main liability, but can you really be sure he won’t have speed on ovals in the future? Dario Franchitti and Will Power, and to a lesser extent Álex Palou, were terrible oval drivers when they started, even when they were dominating road course races, and they all got it. Who’s to say that can’t also happen here (although I doubt Lundgaard’s career will quite match any of those three)? Well, hopefully he ends up replacing either Dixon in the #9 car or Rosenqvist in the #60, since those are both better cars than what he had. At this point, he really deserves the Ganassi car, and I’m pretty sure he’d eventually win oval races if he got it. Even Pato O’Ward hasn’t done all that much on oval races lately, so maybe Lundgaard being fired is a blessing in disguise just like it turned out to be for Malukas. Zak Brown retains his crown as the biggest dick in racing despite heavy competition from others. And maybe Lundgaard just wanted to leave, and he isn’t actually being fired. Maybe I’m taking Marshall Pruett’s reporting at face value too much when he does seem to be more biased overall than Miller was.

It almost feels like what’s really driving this is not maximizing Indy winning chances (if they were trying to do that, they would’ve gone after Josef Newgarden, who even seems to WANT to leave Penske right now, and I don’t blame him after the cheating scandals and especially considering he’s apparently being paid less than most drivers of his stature, even though he’s significantly fallen off, or if you’re just looking at oval talents, how about Christian Rasmussen, the biggest rising oval star), but just getting back at Chip Ganassi for losing the Palou lawsuit. Signing Ganassi’s most successful driver from right under his nose is certainly a giant fuck-you, and Shank being a Ganassi satellite means you could interpret the Rosenqvist re-hiring the same way. This almost reminds me of the NASCAR manufacturer wars in the early ‘90s, when Ford got so pissed about losing Jeff Gordon that for the next few years they vowed to sign away as many of Chevy’s big stars as they could, so over the next few years they signed Ernie Irvan, Ricky Rudd, and Dale Jarrett in quick succession, and they even almost signed Dale Earnhardt until he asked for $1,000,000 a year and the #28 car when Robert Yates didn’t want to pay him that and they only offered him the #88 car. The difference is: all those drivers (even Earnhardt) had more of a future than Dixon and Rosenqvist do now. Ford’s tactical moves to get back at Chevy were smart (until they insisted on replacing Ernie Irvan with Kenny Irwin, thinking they could “recreate Jeff Gordon” anyway and somehow missing Tony Stewart - the driver they should have actually done it with). These moves seem really, really stupid. But whatever. It’s not my team.

Anyway, here’s another F1 driver similarly talented to Ralf Schumacher who thankfully didn’t marry a semi-fascist.

DANIEL RICCIARDO……….AUSTRALIA

Born: July 1, 1989

Best year: 2014
Best drive: 2018 Heineken Chinese Grand Prix at Shanghai International Circuit

One of the most inconsistent 21st-century Formula One drivers, Ricciardo briefly looked championship-caliber at Red Bull, but his career was also punctuated with long mediocre stretches. After Red Bull signed him as a development driver in 2008, he won the Formula Renault 2.0 Western European Cup and British Formula 3 titles and finished second in Formula Renault 3.5 the next three years. After posting a testing lap at Abu Dhabi 1.3 seconds faster than Sebastian Vettel’s qualifying lap in 2010, expectations were sky-high, but Red Bull didn’t have room at their junior operation Toro Rosso, so they farmed him out to the awful HRT team in 2011 before promoting him to Toro Rosso in 2012, where he was matched with future Formula E champion Jean-Éric Vergne the next two seasons, beating him handily in races and even worse in qualifying.

He was promoted to Red Bull alongside four-time defending champion Vettel after Mark Webber’s retirement and proved electrifying. Even though Vettel won the last nine races of 2013, Ricciardo shockingly outperformed him in 2014, earning the only three non-Mercedes wins that season, prompting Vettel to leave for Ferrari as Daniil Kvyat replaced him at Red Bull. Just as unexpectedly, Kvyat beat Ricciardo in points the next year even though he was pretty mediocre and Red Bull knew it, swapping Kvyat out for Toro Rosso’s Max Verstappen in mid-2016.

Ricciardo actually beat Verstappen in 2016 and 2017, becoming Verstappen’s only teammate to do so, but by 2018, Verstappen had unambiguously overtaken Ricciardo. Not wanting to be demoted to #2 status, Ricciardo switched to Renault, where he outperformed both Nico Hülkenberg and Esteban Ocon. However, his performance plummeted in 2021 when he moved to McLaren. Despite giving them their first win since 2012 at Monza after Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton crashed, he was demolished by teammate Lando Norris in 2021 and especially 2022 and couldn’t find any ride for 2023. After an even worse stint for Red Bull’s B team, he retired in 2025 and became a global ambassador for Ford Racing even though he’d never actually raced a Ford.

I ended up not giving Ricciardo any top five seasons even though I originally expected to because I suspect that in 2014, Vettel was underachieving more than Ricciardo was overachieving. Even that year, he only won one of his races naturally, and Fernando Alonso beat him for #1 in my open wheel model globally. Initially beating Verstappen is a major feather in his cap, but he was a teenager at the time. Ultimately, most of Ricciardo’s eight wins typically came down to benefiting from others’ misfortunes rather than on-track passing for the lead. Admittedly, Ricciardo peaking during Mercedes’s dynasty run would’ve made that difficult for anyone. He did outduel Valtteri Bottas at Shanghai in 2018, but that marked the only time he passed a Mercedes for the win. Despite being better than some World Champions, I’m not sure whether I consider him one of the best drivers to never win a championship.

Open wheel model: #61 of 931 (.231)

Teammate head-to-heads: 159-109 (7-1 vs. Nathanael Berthon, 17-8 vs. Andrea Caldarelli, 16-3 vs. Max Chilton, 7-1 vs. Brendon Hartley, 10-4 vs. Nico Hulkenberg, 0-1 vs. Narain Karthikeyan, 8-8 vs. Daniil Kvyat, 4-1 vs. Vitantonio Liuzzi, 10-28 vs. Lando Norris, 9-3 vs. Esteban Ocon, 0-1 vs. Charles Pic, 1-0 vs. Alexander Sims, 8-12 vs. Yuki Tsunoda, 29-13 vs. Jean-Eric Vergne, 9-1 vs. Tristan Vautier, 11-3 vs. Sebastian Vettel, 13-20 vs. Max Verstappen, 0-1 vs. Robert Wickens)

Year-by-year: 2008: C-, 2009: C-, 2010: C-, 2011: C-, 2012: C, 2013: C+, 2014: E, 2015: C, 2016: E, 2017: E, 2018: E-, 2019: E-, 2020: E-, 2021: C-