Daniel Ricciardo is going to the Indy 500, and he’s not pretending it’s just another guest appearance.
Now 36 and two seasons removed from his last Formula 1 start — that final outing coming with Racing Bulls at the 2024 Singapore Grand Prix — Ricciardo has confirmed he’ll be at Indianapolis on May 24 for the first time. Not as a driver, not as a maybe-one-day flirtation, but as a straight-up spectator. And by his own admission, it’s likely to land with more force than he’s expecting.
Since stepping away from motorsport last September, Ricciardo has largely kept his public life on his own terms, taking an ambassadorial role with Ford, Red Bull’s new technical partner, while leaning into projects beyond the paddock. This week brought the clearest window yet into what the post-F1 version of Ricciardo looks like: his lifestyle brand, Enchanté, is linking up with IndyCar regular Conor Daly for the 500. It’s a neat commercial crossover, sure, but the more interesting part is how Ricciardo talks about the race itself — like someone rediscovering what it felt like to love motorsport before it became a job.
Appearing on Daly’s Speed Street podcast, Ricciardo didn’t sell Indianapolis as a bucket-list tick or a corporate obligation. He sounded like a kid again.
“What you’ve told me about Indy and the 500, I’ve probably never been more excited since I was a kid to go to a race and just be a fan of a race,” Ricciardo said. “I think it’s going to really hit me hard. I’m excited. I’m excited to be a fan.”
If you’ve followed Ricciardo through his F1 years, that phrasing matters. The grid-walk grin and the soundbites were always part of the package, but there’s something a little more exposed in how he describes stepping outside the “F1 sphere bubble” and suddenly realising just how unnatural that life is when you’re no longer living it.
“I got used to how intense the schedule was — the paddock, all of it — and that became normal,” he said. “But now that I’m outside of it I’m like: ‘Oh, that was as far from normal!’”
It’s the kind of reflection you don’t hear often from drivers while they’re still clinging to the next contract. Ricciardo isn’t. And that changes the tone completely. There’s no agenda here about proving he still belongs at the top level, no need to keep the door ajar. He can be honest about the claustrophobia of a calendar planned down to the minute, about how that intensity warps your baseline.
And because he’s been on the inside of F1’s machine for so long, his curiosity about IndyCar’s biggest week isn’t the touristy “wow, America!” type. He wants to see the rhythm — the human stuff.
“There’s a curiosity with what a week looks like for you for the biggest race of the year,” Ricciardo explained to Daly. “So the schedule, and your personal time compared to your ‘on time’, I’m curious to see how that is and how laidback are the drivers, or how intense and switched on they are the whole weekend.”
That’s a retired F1 driver speaking like a former prisoner comparing timetables. It’s also a reminder of what Ricciardo’s been missing — not necessarily racing itself, but the ability to experience racing without the constant emotional overhead. When you’re competing in F1, even joy has a performance element. At Indianapolis, he gets to watch without needing to extract a meaning from every lap.
He’s also drawn, predictably, to the sensory violence of the place. Ricciardo has always been a driver who talks about feel and sound with a bit more reverence than most, and the Indy 500 hits those nerves in a different way to F1’s polished theatre.
“I think the sheer size of the infield and the sound [also attract me to the Indy 500],” he said. “That’s probably what I was drawn to most with racing, how cool race cars sounded, so very curious to hear what you sound like wide open and just seeing, coming into Turn 1, how scary that looks.”
Then came the line that gave it away — the one that tells you he knows exactly where he sits in the sport now.
“I’ll be glad that I don’t have a suit or a helmet on!”
It’s funny, because it’s Ricciardo, but it’s also revealing. He’s not teasing a comeback. He’s not using Indy as a stage for a “never say never” moment. He’s acknowledging, with a wink, that he can now enjoy the fear factor from a grandstand rather than from behind a visor.
For a driver whose identity was so tightly fused with F1 for so long — the Red Bull highs, the McLaren detour, the final chapter with Racing Bulls — there’s something quietly significant about choosing to show up at one of motorsport’s most mythologised events just to absorb it. No debriefs, no engineering meetings, no sponsor obligations masquerading as fun. Just a former grand prix winner turning up to watch 33 cars charge into Turn 1 and letting it “hit… hard”.
Maybe that’s the point. After years of F1 normalising the abnormal, the Indy 500 offers Ricciardo a different kind of intensity — one he can finally take in without it taking something back.
