McLaren race engineer and director of human performance Tom Stallard disagreed with Red Bull team principal Christian Horner’s assessment that Daniel Ricciardo returned to Red Bull with “bad habits” in his driving.

Stallard, currently serving as Oscar Piastri’s race engineer, performed the same role for Ricciardo before the Aussie left McLaren at the end of 2022 before taking up a third driver role for Red Bull.

McLaren engineer disagrees with Christian Horner ‘bad habits’ claim against Daniel Ricciardo

Ricciardo was eventually elevated into a race seat at AlphaTauri in the middle of 2023 after a successful tyre test at Silverstone, coming in to replace Nyck de Vries at Red Bull’s junior team, but Horner said earlier last year that Ricciardo had “picked up some habits… that we didn’t recognise” from his previous stint with Red Bull, from when he had left in 2018.

Horner was sat alongside McLaren CEO Zak Brown at the time and joked that the team had to “feed him up a bit” after his stint with the Woking-based outfit, before elaborating: “I think the problem is when you drive a car that obviously has its limitations, you adapt and you try and adjust to extract the maximum out of that car.

“And it was clear when he came back, that he picked up some habits that were not… that we didn’t recognise as the Daniel that had left us two or three years earlier.”

When Horner’s ‘bad habits’ comments were put to Stallard on the Beyond the Grid podcast, and that the team looked to iron those out during his simulator work prior to his on-track return, his former race engineer replied: “I disagree.

“I would say actually that Daniel was driving the car very normally and, if anything, our car required some quite specific actions, primarily around the turn-in phase of the corner, which he struggled to adapt to because they require very, very precise timing from the driver, and you have to do that quite ballistically – very, very quickly.

More on Daniel Ricciardo as his Formula 1 exit has been confirmed

👉 Four reasons why Daniel Ricciardo should accept the US Grand Prix invitation

👉 What happened to Daniel Ricciardo? The compelling theories to explain his sharp F1 decline

“There were other corner types that didn’t require such a sharp input that Daniel’s approach worked very well [with] and, if anything, Lando learned from Daniel in those.

“So I don’t think he did leave the team with bad habits, he learned the team having adapted his driving in a certain way to try and get the best out of our car, and then, clearly, at the time at least, the Red Bull felt like they needed something else.

“My impression is that that is not as much bad habits as just like, ‘I’ve got one approach, now I’m trying to adapt to another car and just a different way of driving.’”

Ricciardo is now out of a drive after being replaced by Liam Lawson ahead of the United States Grand Prix, and Stallard reflected on the highs and lows of what became a shorter-than-anticipated stint at McLaren.

He was ultimately replaced by Piastri after his contract was ended early by mutual agreement with McLaren, but his former engineer highlighted his excellent race victory in McLaren colours as evidence of the “really high peaks” that were within him on his day.

“Working with Daniel was great because he’s just a really lovely guy,” Stallard said.

“He’s a really positive guy to be around. I think it’s, you know, it’s well known that we didn’t achieve what we wanted to achieve with him at McLaren.

“There were times when he was able to get on top of the car, able to drive the car how he needed, able to get the best out of it. And that weekend in Monza [2021], he was pretty faultless all weekend.

“He qualified well, we moved forwards in the Sprint, we were able to take the lead off the launch at the race start, and then, although Max [Verstappen] and Lewis [Hamilton] ultimately took themselves out in the race, we had them both covered, and Daniel would have won anyway.

“So there were some really high peaks, and that one was our first win for almost 10 years. That felt absolutely huge, but there were other weekends that didn’t go so well.

“I think that the car we had needed a different sort of driving to the cars he’d been successful in previously, and he struggled to adapt what he was doing to get the best out of that.

“Obviously, he stopped working here and went to AlphaTauri, and again, my impression from the outside was that his time there was similar.

“There were some very good days when they achieved what they’d been hoping to achieve in that team, and other days when it didn’t work as well.

“So I think the main thing is that Daniel, when he was here, was always really positive, always really supportive with the team, and everyone who worked directly with him loved working with him, so it was tough on us as well that, between all of us, we weren’t able to achieve what we wanted to achieve together.”

Read next: Christian Horner’s sternest warning yet to Sergio Perez in ‘can’t afford’ ruling