Why McLaren felt it had to act on Ricciardo

For there are many who believe that Ricciardo, who had a firm contract for 2023, should have been given more time to unlock the speed that everyone knows is within him.

But F1 is not a championship where being nice offers guarantee rewards. It is a brutal arena where success and failure is measured in tenths of a second – and if any element of your package is not performing then it needs addressing. Stand still for a moment and you find yourself going backwards.

In McLaren’s case, it had become abundantly clear throughout 2022 that the gap that had been present between Lando Norris and Ricciardo throughout much of last season had not really closed up this year.

With Ricciardo still unable to get the confidence in the McLaren concept that was needed to extract the most performance from the car, more often than not he would end up a couple of tenths shy of his team-mate.

Were McLaren battling alone, with a buffer to the opposition, then such a gap between the pair of them would perhaps not be so alarming.

But when you are trapped in an intense midfield fight, three-tenths can sometimes be the difference between Q3 heroics and a Q1 exit. And find yourself stuck in the lower reaches of the grid on Sunday, then it is incredibly hard to make progress and haul yourself nearer the front.

Repeat that state of affairs too many times and you end up with the kind of points difference that McLaren has found between its two cars. It has not been lost on the Woking-based squad’s management that Norris currently has 76 points, while Ricciardo only has 19.

It’s among the biggest deficits between team-mates on the grid and, for a squad as ambitious as McLaren in getting back to the front, there were obviously clear concerns about the impact of repeating such a skew in 2023 if the F1 grid closed up.

Whereas now, Ricciardo’s points contribution has left it battling with Alpine for fourth spot, the concern was that a missing 50+ points next year could be two or three constructors’ championship spots. And that means less commercial rights money; less interest from sponsors and a drop in bonuses for McLaren staff.

Team principal Andreas Seidl makes no bones of the fact that the job of an F1 team is to have a driver pairing who are evenly matched in getting the most out of their car as that way its full potential is realised.

“The goal…