Ten years on, the 2016 Monaco Grand Prix still gnaws at Daniel Ricciardo. He had put the Red Bull on pole for the first time in his career, led the race in changing conditions, then watched the win evaporate when his team sent him in to a stop with no tyres ready.

“That was definitely one of my worst days in F1,” he told Formula 1 in a career retrospective published on Wednesday.

Formula 1’s own website built the video-and-text piece around a theme the Australian returned to throughout: racing is a serious business, but it should not stop being fun. He described it as the thinking behind the shoey, the champagne spraying and the pool jumps that made him one of F1’s most recognisable faces.

“I know it’s serious and there’s a lot of money and business involved in the sport, but we can still make it fun,” he told the platform.

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The highest high in Montreal

Ricciardo’s eight wins drove the retrospective. He opened on his first, the 2014 Canadian Grand Prix, where a sixth-place grid slot turned into late passes on Sergio Perez and Nico Rosberg and a one-word team radio message: “wow”. He described the laugh of shock and joy that followed as the highest high he reached in the sport.

Monaco 2016 was the low point. He left nothing on the table in qualifying, he said, before a Red Bull pit crew that did not have his tyres ready handed the win to Lewis Hamilton.

Pool jump in 2018, last win at Monza

Ricciardo got Monaco back in 2018, nursing a wounded Red Bull to victory and celebrating with his trademark pool jump. His eighth and final win came at McLaren at Monza in 2021, ending the team’s nine-year wait for a grand prix victory.

From Singapore 2024 to a Ford ambassador role

Ricciardo has not raced since the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix, where Racing Bulls dropped him for Liam Lawson. He has since taken on a global ambassador role with Ford Racing, Red Bull’s new power unit partner for 2026, and has publicly entertained a run at Mexico’s Baja 1000 off-road race.

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On the F1 Beyond the Grid podcast at the end of October, he softened an earlier stance that he would never put a helmet on again. He now talks openly about a Le Mans run and has floated Max Verstappen as his dream sports car team-mate.

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