#and the way his voice cracked in thag interview and he had to so publicly come to terms with the end of his career

[rickybaby]

I can’t believe I’m agreeing with anything Gunther Steiner said, but he’s kind of right when he said Daniel came back too quickly.

It’s not that Daniel wasn’t ready for it. He got an opportunity to come back and he would have been stupid to refuse it. More importantly, Daniel LOOKED ready to come back. He’d clearly gone and done a lot of thinking and work to rebuild himself up. All the sim work he’d done with Simon reflected in his lap times for the Silverstone test. Everything he said on his comeback showed he’d put a lot of thought on what he’d do differently if given a second chance and he was committed to not make the same mistakes again.

The main problem was that the sports hadn’t had time to miss him, hadn’t had time to forget and remember that before mclaren happened, he was the last of the late brakers. So when he came back last year, people still had this image of him as the broken man from McLaren and then Daniel got injured and he didn’t get the chance and time to do anything to dispel that image before Liam came in. And then everybody kept comparing his youth to this image of Daniel and everyone decided they’d rather the new shiny one over the old broken one. Even then, they all kept asking where the old Daniel was and yet, any time the old Daniel did show up, everyone got mad that he dared to step out of the tiny box they wanted to keep him in.

In a way, there’s a certain peace in knowing he won’t be on the grid next year. Even if he had gotten the red bull seat for next year, the same cycle of ‘is this Daniel Ricciardo’s last race?’ would have gone on and on. They would have once again imposed some unachievable standards on him and each time, they would have kept moving the goalposts for him. Even when he would have had him back in that seat, Christian wouldn’t have ever forgiven him for leaving in the first place and the sports in general would still not have forgiven him for failing at McLaren. And that would still have been true even if he’d gone and recaptured his glories of the past. Somehow Daniel has never been afforded the same grace others have been given over and over again