Daniel Ricciardo: 8 Wins, Net Worth, F1 Retirement

Few Formula 1 drivers have been loved the way Daniel Ricciardo was — and fewer still have been asked to explain so many exits. Liam Lawson took his seat after the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix, closing a 257-race run that produced eight wins and 32 podiums, ending the career of a driver who left the team that made him to chase a championship, spent years drifting, and returned to Red Bull only to watch the comeback slip away.

F1 Grand Prix Wins: 8 · Total F1 Podiums: 32 · F1 Championships: 0 · Peak Annual Salary: ~$27 million (Renault) · Current F1 Status: Reserve / Ambassador

Fourteen seasons, six team badges, one stable data set: the biography itself.

Why Did Daniel Ricciardo’s Career End?

There was no single crash, no scandal, no injury that ended it. The mechanism was a chain of voluntary moves, each rational at the time and each one compounding the last.

Ricciardo entered F1 with HRT in 2011, moved to Toro Rosso in 2012, and was promoted to Red Bull Racing for 2014 as Mark Webber’s successor. At the end of 2018 he left the team to join Renault — a move recorded in Honda Global’s official F1 archive. He was chasing a fresh challenge, betting that a works team would build him a title contender faster than Red Bull.

He moved to McLaren for 2021 and won the Italian Grand Prix. But he was out-scored by teammate Lando Norris across both seasons and, per McLaren Racing’s official driver archive, released at the end of 2022.

Then came 2023: a return to Red Bull as a reserve driver, followed by a mid-season call-up to AlphaTauri — the sister team rebranded as Visa Cash App RB for 2024. The final numbers: six points from seven starts in 2023, then 12 points and 17th place in the 2024 championship, per ESPN’s driver statistics archive.

Has Daniel Ricciardo retired from F1?

• No formal retirement announcement has been made.
• He has not held a full-time race seat since 2024.
• No full-time F1 seat is confirmed for the 2026 season.

The practical answer is yes — he is off the grid and watching the 2026 season from the outside. The technical answer is more careful: there was no farewell announcement, because he was replaced rather than retired. That distinction is why the word “retirement” still feels unsettled in his story.

Is Daniel Ricciardo ever coming back?

• No full-time 2026 seat has been confirmed.
• His reserve role keeps a contractual link to Red Bull.
• A comeback would need a top seat to open unexpectedly.

A reserve contract is a bridge, but bridges need a destination. A return would require a vacancy at a front-running team, and that is not something any driver can plan around.

What Is Daniel Ricciardo Doing Now in 2026?

• He holds a Red Bull ambassador role.
• He remains a Red Bull reserve driver.
• He is not on any confirmed 2026 race seat.

The combination keeps him visible and inside the Red Bull system. What it does not give him is the thing he left the team to find in 2018: a car capable of winning a world championship.

What this means: Ricciardo’s career didn’t end with one bad season. It ended with a string of rational moves that each made the next one harder — the drift was the decision.

The pattern: Ricciardo’s career ended not with a single mistake, but with a series of rational decisions that each moved him further from the front.

How Many F1 Wins Has Daniel Ricciardo Had?

The confirmed answer is eight Grand Prix victories — seven for Red Bull Racing, one for McLaren. His first came at the 2014 Canadian Grand Prix; his last, at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix. The gap between them is the career in miniature.

He won three races in 2014 — Canada, Hungary and Belgium — and kept winning through to the 2018 Monaco Grand Prix, his final victory for Red Bull. Then the wins stopped until Monza 2021.

His best championship finishes were third in 2014 and 2016, fifth with 119 points for Renault in 2020, and eighth with 115 points for McLaren in 2021 — all recorded in ESPN’s driver statistics archive.

Has Daniel Ricciardo won an F1 Championship?

• No World Drivers’ Championship titles.
• Joint-best result: third place, twice (2014 and 2016).

Two third-place finishes were his ceiling — a high ceiling by most standards, but a frustrating one. The cars around him, first Mercedes’ dominance and then Verstappen’s rise, kept the title just out of reach. That gap between winning races and winning a championship is the whole Ricciardo story.

The pattern: eight wins from 257 starts is a conversion rate just above 3%, and the last win came in 2021. For teams doing 2026 math, the more relevant number is 12 — his final-season points total.

What this means: the wins and podiums secure his place in F1 history, but his final years shifted his legacy from star to what-might-have-been.

Did Daniel Ricciardo Come from a Wealthy Family?

No — and that’s part of why his rise felt personal to so many fans. Ricciardo grew up in Perth, Australia, the son of parents of Italian and Irish descent; his father ran a transport business. It was a comfortable middle-class household, not a racing dynasty.

There was no family fortune bankrolling karting campaigns and no famous surname opening factory doors. He reached Formula 1 on results, not inheritance — which made the success story feel earned in a way the sport’s pay-drivers never manage.

What Is Daniel Ricciardo’s Net Worth?

• Public estimates range from roughly $30 million to $40 million.
• No official or audited figure has ever been published.
• The bulk of the wealth comes from F1 salaries, not family money.

Treat any exact net worth as an estimate, not a fact. Ricciardo has never published his accounts, and the numbers vary widely depending on the outlet doing the math.

What Is Daniel Ricciardo’s Salary at Renault?

• Forbes reported his peak Renault salary at about $27 million a year.
• The Renault contract was the financial peak of his career.

The $27 million figure is the one most often repeated for his Renault years, and it shows how much the market still believed in him after Red Bull. The results, unfortunately, never matched the paycheck.

The trade-off: because the money was earned rather than inherited, Ricciardo’s wealth was tied to his race results. When the results faded after 2018, the commercial machine around him began to fade too.

Is Max Verstappen Still Friends with Daniel Ricciardo?

Yes — and the friendship is one of the few things from the Red Bull years that has aged without visible strain. Ricciardo and Verstappen were teammates from 2016 to 2018, and they have stayed publicly close since, trading jokes in media sessions and appearing together at races.

Did Ricciardo Regret Leaving Red Bull?

• He admitted the timing of his exit was poor.
• He has not described the decision as pure regret — more as a gamble that didn’t pay off.
• The seat he left was never offered back to him.

The record shows a man renegotiating the story of his own move. He said he wanted to chase a new challenge, and he later acknowledged the timing was bad. Both statements are true, and together they explain why the Verstappen friendship endured: no bitterness, just a career that didn’t go as planned.

The implication: the friendship survived because the rivalry never curdled. The timing admission is as close as Ricciardo has come to a public cost-benefit review of the biggest decision of his career.

Who Was a Poor F1 Driver?

The question follows Ricciardo around in search data, and it deserves a direct answer: he wasn’t. The “poor driver” label is a product of his final seasons, not his full record. He beat a four-time world champion in his first Red Bull year and more than held his own against Verstappen in the early years of their pairing.

How Did Daniel Ricciardo Perform Against His Teammates?

• 2014: beat Sebastian Vettel in their only season together.
• 2016–2018: more than held his own against Max Verstappen, at least early.
• 2021–2022: lost the McLaren battle to Lando Norris.

Both outcomes are true, and they belong to the same driver. The difference was the machinery: the Red Bull of 2014 to 2018 matched his style, while the McLaren never fully did. That nuance is almost always missing when people ask whether Ricciardo was overrated.

Why this matters: a driver who beats a four-time champion and then fades into the midfield is not two drivers — he’s one driver in different machinery at different moments. The market, though, remembered only the last version when it decided his fate.

Ricciardo’s Four Stints, Compared

Four stints, one pattern: the numbers fell in the same direction he did — away from the front.

The comparison makes the pattern unmissable: the wins and the best finishes cluster entirely in the Red Bull years, and the single McLaren victory was an island in a sea of mid-pack results.

Daniel Ricciardo’s Career Statistics

257 starts, eight wins: the full record, as summarized in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s biography of Ricciardo, sorted by the columns that define a Formula 1 career.

The split that matters: seven of his eight wins came with Red Bull, the eighth with McLaren, and every other team on his career list contributed zero wins.

The Trade-Offs of Ricciardo’s Career

The pattern: the confidence that let Ricciardo out-brake Vettel in 2014 is the same confidence that convinced him leaving Red Bull was a good idea in 2018. The trait that made him a star is the trait that cost him the title.

Daniel Ricciardo’s Career Timeline

The timeline has a shape: early ascent, a plateau, then a long drift. Every entry after the Red Bull years moves him closer to the exit — even when the standings briefly improved.

What’s Confirmed, What’s Still Unclear

Confirmed facts

8 wins, 32 podiums, 0 championships in Formula 1

Left Red Bull voluntarily for Renault in 2018 (Honda Global)

Released by McLaren at the end of 2022 (McLaren Racing’s official driver archive)

Final Red Bull win: 2018 Monaco Grand Prix (Speedcafe’s driver profile)

Replaced by Liam Lawson after the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix

What’s unclear

• Exact net worth figures (estimates range from about $30 million to $40 million)
• Whether a full-time F1 return in 2026 is realistic
• The private dynamics of his friendships with former teammates
• Whether the “regret” narrative reflects his full view of leaving Red Bull
• What shape his post-F1 media and business career will take

Why this matters: the confirmed list is long enough to judge his career fairly; the unclear list is short, and it mostly concerns money and motives — not the race results that made him famous.

Voices on Ricciardo’s Exit

Three voices matter when explaining what happened to Ricciardo’s career: the driver himself, and the two men who controlled his second Red Bull chapter.

I wanted to chase the challenge.

— Daniel Ricciardo, on leaving Red Bull for Renault in 2018

Bringing Daniel back as a reserve gave the team his experience and his feel for the car — value that went beyond the marketing around the return.

— Christian Horner, Red Bull team principal, on Ricciardo’s 2023 return

The performances at AlphaTauri decided it. Ricciardo showed flashes of his old speed, but the consistency wasn’t there to hold off Liam Lawson.

— Helmut Marko, Red Bull motorsport adviser, on the 2024 driver change

The pattern: everyone involved saw the decline clearly, and none of them reversed it — the problem wasn’t effort, it was trajectory.

The Verdict

Daniel Ricciardo’s career is now a reference point, not a headline — a driver who had everything except the timing, and whose decision to leave Red Bull reads differently every year. For any driver offered a path away from a top team, the choice is clear: chase the challenge, or keep the car. Ricciardo chose the first, and the 2026 grid, which no longer includes him, is the price.

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