Red Bull F1 boss Christian Horner has revealed that he offered Daniel Ricciardo a place at Red Bull when they both met in Mexico last year.
"It all kicked off in a hotel room in Mexico last year, I had a meeting with Daniel and it was clear that his options for this year were going to be a bit limited and he just looked pretty broken," Horner said in a podcast.
"I said to him why didn’t he come back to Red Bull for 12 months, out of the car predominantly, help us with simulation work, and a bit of tyre testing, and just come back into the fold and refind his passion for the sport," he stated.
"Because it was clear that he wasn’t enjoying things. To be honest with you, I didn’t really recognise the Daniel over the last couple of years that we’d grown so used to, he’d grown up with us – so that’s where it started," Horner claimed.
He then explained what happened after Ricciardo rejoined the ranks of Red Bull. "He came in and drove the simulator a couple of days after Abu Dhabi, and it was a complete disaster. He’d picked up every bad habit imaginable. He was working with his previous engineer and gradually we unpicked it. With each session, he just got better and better, you could see his confidence growing to the point that he was absolutely on the pace with the race drivers," the Red Bull F1 boss stated.
Ricciardo then took part in a Pirelli tyre test in the RB19 which sealed his return to the F1 grid with Red Bull's sister team Alpha Tauri, replacing Nyck de Vries, who was shown the door only 10 races into his F1 career.
"The plan was always to put him in for that Silverstone test. We kept him very busy on off-track activities, marketing-wise, and the test was extremely impressive. I was just pleased to see that he was still able to operate at that level," Horner stated.
After the test, Horner had shared a piece of information with the former McLaren driver, which made him feel at home. "I mentioned to him that that (his performance at the tyre test) would have put him on the front row of the grid, and you could see the relief in his eyes, and almost the pressure release off of his shoulders, that he could still do it and that he wasn’t going mad. The old Daniel was still there. And then his long runs were very impressive in the work that he did for Pirelli was absolutely on the money," He added.