Daniel Ricciardo’s return at the 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix was not a comeback to glory. It was stranger and more revealing than that: a race seat at Red Bull’s junior team, offered to a grand prix winner trying to prove he still belonged in Formula 1.
Ricciardo had left McLaren at the end of 2022 after two difficult seasons alongside Lando Norris. His 2021 Italian Grand Prix win had been spectacular, but it had not disguised the broader problem. He never looked fully at ease with McLaren’s car characteristics, and by the end of 2022 the team had chosen Oscar Piastri for its future.
For the first half of 2023, Ricciardo was Red Bull’s third driver: smiling in the garage, doing simulator work, appearing in promotional duties and waiting for any evidence that the racing part of his career had not quietly closed. That evidence arrived after the British Grand Prix, when AlphaTauri replaced Nyck de Vries and put Ricciardo back on the grid for Hungary on 23 July.
A comeback with Red Bull politics attached
AlphaTauri was not a soft landing. The car had been one of the weakest on the grid, and Ricciardo’s team-mate Yuki Tsunoda already had the rhythm of the season behind him. The wider context was impossible to ignore too. Ricciardo’s return was not only about AlphaTauri points. It was also a live audition inside the Red Bull system, where Sergio Pérez’s form and Verstappen’s dominance kept the second Red Bull seat under constant examination.
Ricciardo qualified 13th in Hungary and finished 13th, ahead of Tsunoda. The result was modest, but the performance was clean enough to matter. He avoided the desperation that can cling to comeback drives and gave AlphaTauri a reference point from the first weekend.
The season would not become straightforward. Ricciardo later broke a metacarpal in his left hand during practice for the Dutch Grand Prix, forcing another interruption and bringing Liam Lawson into the car. Even so, Hungary reset the story. Ricciardo was no longer only the former McLaren driver trying to rebuild credibility from the outside.
At the Hungaroring, he became a Formula 1 race driver again. The result was 13th place, which sounds small until the context does its work. After six months away, a difficult McLaren exit and no guarantee that the sport would reopen the door, Ricciardo had a race number, a cockpit and another chance to make the grin secondary to the driving.
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