Daniel Ricciardo has ruled out any possibility of replacing Sebastian Vettel at Ferrari next season.
Last week it was rumoured the Australian was considered as a ‘Plan-B’ for the Italian team should the four-time champion move on and he has a clause in his Renault contract allowing him to talk to either Ferrari or Mercedes.
However, Ricciardo has rubbished those claims stating his current contract is iron-clad for next season too.
“To be honest, I’ve been seeing articles like for the last three or four years consecutively, so it’s not new to me now,” he told Auto Week.
“I have my contract, it’s a hard contract until the end of 2020, it was a two-year deal. So if Seb did walk away this year, then that’s his decision, but I wouldn’t be involved in that.”
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That means the newly-turned 30-year-old is committed to leading Renault’s efforts to become a championship-contending team once again despite a mixed first nine races of 2019.
“There’s a lot a lot of stuff to take care of this year still,” he said. “I think Austria took a little bit of wind out of our sails because we had quite good momentum through Monaco, Canada and France.
“Then we obviously didn’t feel like we performed as well as we should have in Austria. I’ve been on the phone a little bit to the engineers this week and trying to figure it out. So Silverstone should be better.
“I think we’ve understood a little bit,” he concluded.
