Daniel Ricciardo has revealed he took Kimi Raikkonen snubbing his “friendly” interactions “personally”.
The two drivers couldn’t be any more different in their personalities, at least in Formula 1, with the Finn known for his monotonal, almost uninterested approach compared to the always open, outgoing Australian.
Perhaps then it wasn’t surprising that when Ricciardo tried to interact with Raikkonen, he actually ended up on the wrong side of the Renault driver’s mood.
“Ultimately each driver believes that they are better than the guy next to them,” he said in an interview with Esquire Middle East.
“On the grid, I tend to be quite friendly with people, but if I smile at someone and they blank me, it kind of p*sses me off. I take it personally for sure.
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“I remember Kimi used to give me the cold shoulder and I took that personally. I would make a mental note of it, and on-track if I was ever feeling generous it was never going to be towards him.”
In a separate interview on Formula1.com, Ricciardo was asked about his happy personality and whether it followed him onto the track.
“Yea I would say about 20 per cent of that character remains in the car but the other 80 per cent is a very serious, I guess driven character,” he explained.
“I think as well, the helmet is quite symbolic, like you know that the helmet is a safety piece of equipment so it kind of switches you into that mindset that you’re about to do something with a level of risk.
“That already changes your mindset, as I say I keep 20 per cent of the jovial character because yea I’m still having fun and I’m joking over the radio, it’s like in Monaco, the amount of times I’ve brushed the wall and giggled afterwards, it just like I’m playing with fire but getting away with it and I have fun with that.”
But even though Ricciardo tries to spread his positivity across his team, he does admit there can be another side to him.
“If I know everyone’s down in the team, say if we’ve had a terrible weekend or something, I do feel some responsibility not just to be another guy who’s down as well, I think I feel a bit of responsibility myself to try and bring everyone back up,” he said.
“But I’m not going to bring everyone up when there’s no merit, of course if there’s some **** to be thrown around then for sure I’m going to do that because I care as much as anyone else about our results, but in terms of us turning a circle and then getting us out of a hole, I do feel responsible to try and cheer everyone up and I think, give perspective,
“You know at the end of the day, yes it might be a bad race or a bad weekend, yes it sucks and we have to find ways to be better, but, we’ve got another chance in a week or two weeks time, we got a chance to learn from our mistakes and we travel the world driving cars in circles so it’s not that bad.”