McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo has re-worded his criticism of Formula 1’s social team, admitting recent comments he gave in an interview were “too aggressive”.
Ricciardo labelled the team “f**cking idiots” for their handling and portrayal of F1 crashes in a ‘top 10 moments’ video from 2020.
However, the Australian states he regrets his choice of words in the conversation, and knows he “should do better” going forward.
“I certainly have to be better with my choice of words,” Ricciardo said. “If I could take that quote back, I would. It was too aggressive.
“I should know better as well being in the sport as long as I have. And even if I feel at the time that it might be out of context, I know that it is going to get pushed. So I should do better with that.
“It could just be me as well, like sometimes I might get just too comfortable with whoever is conducting the interview, and I might just take it a little lightly. So I was made aware of it, obviously as it started to gain traction I was like ‘ah, yes I do not want to attack too much’.”
While Ricciardo is remorseful for the words he used, the 31-year-old has stood his ground in criticising the content produced, stating the sport should be promoting success stories of the individuals rather than the crashes they’re involved in.
“I felt last year was such an amazing year for F1,” Ricciardo said. “There were so many different podium getters, there were a lot of exciting races.
“I certainly would not put it under a boring season. I just felt like there was probably more room to expose the highs of the sport, the great achievements of a lot of individual drivers and individual performances.
“I felt that there were better stories to be told as opposed to just crashes. This is obviously my opinion but I feel that our sport is better than that.
“I feel that we are better than just showing crashes. I feel that we are above that. I feel that we are the most talented drivers in the world, and we are driving these amazing cars.
“So normally a crash is showing less of our talents. I feel it is probably the way the sport is perceived, and we are perceived as drivers. We absolutely make mistakes but I would probably highlight the highs more if I had creative control.
“I don’t know if every other driver feels like that, but obviously it is how I feel. I have apologised, but I would take back at least the language from those comments. That was overall my opinion of what I would do if I had a chance to direct it a little bit.”
Completely agree with Daniel Ricciardo. As someone who has competed in motorsports for over 50 years and had the odd incident, watching crashes makes me feel very uncomfortable and I normally look away. The social team can and must do better to show the extraordinary skill and abilities of F1 drivers plus the teams behind them. These cars are exceeding difficult to drive at all let alone at the speeds they do and more articles showing what is involved, for example how many changes does the average driver make on his steering wheel on each lap, while travelling at 300kph+. What is involved in an engine or gearbox change and so on…..