About Daniel Ricciardo
Hi guys,
I don't know what you guys think about it, but I have a feeling that we will see Daniel Ricciardo back in F1, but maybe not in the way that many of us wanted.
Now, we know that Nyck de Vries has been sacked 10 races in and was replaced with Daniel Ricciardo. However, bringing him into F1 23 comes with problems.
Late in F1 22, EA decided to wipe Cem Bölükbasi out of existence and filled the empty space with Tatiana Calderón, who in my opinion isn't any better than Cem, and she's even older than him. The Turkish driver was never seen again since then.
One example that Codies did well with changing the driver roster during the game's lifetime was F1 2019, where if you recall, Pierre Gasly was sacked from Red Bull halfway through the season and replaced with Alexander Albon, and in this case, no driver had to be erased from the game to make space, as it was an easy task to just swap two drivers.
In this particular case with de Vries and Ricciardo, it's very difficult. Nyck de Vries drove the first race in Bahrain, so erasing him out of existence and replacing him with Ricciardo has the game basically pretend he never made it to F1 to begin with, which is unrealistic, as he was driving the AlphaTauri for half a season.
So what Codies could potentially do regarding Daniel Ricciardo, is they could add him as a My Team Icon with his current 2023 helmet. He would only be a bronze Icon because he is no world champion, but having him in the game available for the player to hire is a far better idea than pretending that Nyck de Vries was never in F1 to begin with. And the best thing about these Icons, they never retire, so you can try to get Daniel Ricciardo his first championship title in a span of 10 seasons.
A similar thing also happened in F1 22, where Mika Häkkinen was patched into the game as a silver My Team Icon, so this is in fact very likely to happen.
Let's hope for the best.
Good day,
Nico