Daniel Ricciardo’s break-up with McLaren continues with £217k supercar for sale

Michelle Foster
Daniel Ricciardo in the rain with a McLaren umbrella. Japan October 2022

Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo in the rain with a McLaren umbrella. Japan October 2022

Daniel Ricciardo seems to be ridding himself of his McLaren reminders with the Aussie’s McLaren 720S spider for sale, yours if you’ve got £217,450 to spare.

Ricciardo and McLaren parted ways last season after two disappointing years in which neither felt they’d achieved the results they went into the partnership dreaming of together.

Now it seems the Honey Badger is burning the love letters, starting with his 720S spider.

Being sold through McLaren New Forest and featured on AutoTrader, the two-seater convertible, which accelerates from 0-60 in just 2.8 seconds, has just 6,749 miles on the clock.

“McLaren New Forest are delighted to offer this stunning 720S spider finished in MSO Lantana purple which was used by Daniel Ricciardo during the 2022 F1 season,” reads the description.

“The long list of features includes performance plus pack, convenience pack, exterior carbon fibre upgrade pack 1, interior carbon fibre pack 3, electric & heated memory seats, 360 parking assist plus much more.”

Even the tyres are apparently in excellent conditions, and it could be yours for a cool “£217,450”.

Ricciardo walked away from McLaren at the end of last season, the two agreeing to part ways two years into his three-year deal after the Aussie struggled to fire.

Although he won the 2021 Italian Grand Prix ahead of his team-mate Lando Norris, Ricciardo was all too often slower than his team-mate and unable to understand why.

“It is a little bit of a… I don’t want to say a mystery, but the kind of continuous struggles I had were, at least for me, very foreign,” he admitted at the end of last season.

“We all have our bad races, but to have the amount that I did, and the level that it was at times, like a second a lap off the pace, I’d scratch my head.

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“I think already last year, during the summer break, it occurred to me that I was driving very consciously. It wasn’t natural anymore. I was one step behind. “That was where I was like, ‘I think we’re trying to do too much’.

“That’s not a knock on anyone or anything. It’s more like, okay, did we overanalyse our bad weekends and then get caught up in a way where it was like, ‘we need to start driving like this or setting the car up like that’?

“One thing I keep thinking back on is my very first qualifying with McLaren. I out-qualified Lando. I still didn’t really know the car. I don’t know how many times I out-qualified him over the two years, but it wasn’t much.

“To have done it when I was probably just driving more off feel and instinct and a lack of knowledge about the car, that was when I was probably better off.

“For sure, at some point, we would have got a little too deep and a little too lost.”

Taking a break from F1 racing and instead signing with Red Bull as the team’s official reserve driver, Ricciardo says he’s keen to return to the grid next season but won’t accept just any race-seat as he wants to be near the front of the field.

However, Red Bull’s Helmut Marko has warned prospective teams that this is not the driver that left Red Bull at the end of the 2018 season.

Telling Motorsport-Total.com that the driver is “not at the level” of Max Verstappen nor Sergio Perez, the 80-year-old added: “Something must have happened to him that slowed him down in his competitiveness.”