Daniel Ricciardo has revealed that Max Verstappen first asked for his permission to take his old F1 race number at the 2025 United States GP.<\/p>\n
For 2026, Verstappen can no longer run the #1 as reigning world champion, and was set to revert back to his permanent race number of #33, but a change in the sporting regulations for this season allowed drivers to change their number, if they so wished.<\/p>\n
Verstappen became the first driver since permanent numbers were introduced in 2014 to change, and swapped his #33 for the #3 Ricciardo had run.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, under the rules, a number is still assigned to a driver for two full seasons after their final race, which in Ricciardo’s case was the 2024 Singapore GP, meaning the #3 was not eligible to come back into the open pool until the 2027 season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, given Ricciardo has now retired from racing, he gave Verstappen his blessing, with the Dutchman set to run the #3 in the coming.<\/p>\n
Recalling the conversation, Ricciardo revealed Verstappen first mentioned the idea in Austin last season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I got to see Max recently, and with the number three thing, it is quite cool and a cool story for us,” Ricciardo said.<\/p>\n
“Also, for the fans of F1 who supported Max and I when we were team-mates. So when I caught up with Max in Austin [in 2025], he mentioned that he wanted to take the number three.<\/p>\n
“Of course, I was very, very happy to say yes because otherwise he would have had to wait one more year, so it is a pleasure for me to pass that number on to him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Daniel Ricciardo has revealed that Max Verstappen first asked for his permission to take his old F1 race…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,2476,578,2479,2477,2480,2478,930,576,577,932,1885,2475,582,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-433802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-formula-1","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-daniel-ricciardo","11":"tag-f1","12":"tag-f1-calendar","13":"tag-f1-live","14":"tag-f1-results","15":"tag-f1-standings","16":"tag-ferrari","17":"tag-formula-1","18":"tag-formula1","19":"tag-lewis-hamilton","20":"tag-max-verstappen","21":"tag-motorsport","22":"tag-racing","23":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}