Formula 1 is a sport where contracts are written down to the last comma, and every public word passes through a legal filter. And yet in this world, two grown men make a bet over a tattoo — first over a couple of beers, then in full view of the entire paddock.
When Renault returned to Formula 1 in 2016 as a full-fledged works team, it was a comeback with ambition but without illusions. The French giant bought back the Enstone team — the very one that had delivered championship titles to Fernando Alonso in the mid-2000s, but which had since spent years under the Lotus banner and endured a financial crisis. The cars were slow, the infrastructure outdated, and Renault’s power unit lagged behind those from Mercedes and Ferrari. Season after season, the team floundered in the midfield: points came, but the podium remained beyond the horizon. For a marque whose engines had once powered championship-winning Red Bulls, it was a painful reminder of the gap between past and present.
The man called upon to run this resurrection project was Cyril Abiteboul — a Frenchman who had grown up within the Renault Sport structure and knew both the engine and team sides from the inside. Abiteboul took the role of managing director and became the public face of the brand’s ambitions. He promised progress, built a five-year plan, brought in sponsors and — crucially — poached drivers. The crown jewel of those moves was Daniel Ricciardo, who at the end of 2018 shocked the paddock by leaving Red Bull Racing — a team capable of fighting for wins — for midfield Renault. The contract was generous, but the sporting logic looked dubious: Ricciardo was trading podiums for fights over sixth and seventh.
2019 was tough for this partnership. Ricciardo’s best result was fourth at Monza, his best finish all season. The team ended up fifth in the Constructors’ Championship, which looked modest for a works project with a budget in the hundreds of millions. A podium — the very thing Ricciardo had, in essence, wagered the best years of his career on — seemed out of reach.
The wager was born somewhere on the border between an inside joke and a public challenge. On Thursday before the 2019 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, over a couple of beers, driver and boss came to an agreement for the following season — the last under Ricciardo’s Renault contract, by the start of which the Australian would already have announced his move to McLaren. The terms were simple, and asymmetrical in a way that gave the whole arrangement a particular charm: if Ricciardo brought the car home on the podium, Abiteboul would get a tattoo. The location on his body and the size of the design would be Abiteboul’s call — it was his skin, after all. But Ricciardo would choose the design.
What gets me about this story is precisely the division of control. Abiteboul reserved the right to decide how visible the tattoo would be — he could, roughly speaking, hide it beneath a shirt sleeve. But the image itself — its meaning, its message — he handed over to the driver. It is like contract negotiations in miniature: each side controls its own zone of risk.
The bet quickly stopped being a paddock anecdote. Ricciardo is one of the most media-friendly drivers in Formula 1 history, a man with a trademark broad smile and a talent for turning any interview into a stand-up routine. He mentioned the wager in conversations with journalists, on podcasts, in team videos. Abiteboul, for his part, did not dodge it — he confirmed it, smiled, but seemed fairly sure he would not have to pay up. The Renault R.S.20 did not look like a podium contender under normal circumstances. But the 2020 season had no intention of being normal.
The 2020 season began with a three-month delay because of COVID-19. The Australian Grand Prix was cancelled virtually on the eve of first practice, when teams had already unpacked their equipment in Melbourne. When racing finally resumed in July, the calendar looked unfamiliar: seventeen rounds instead of the planned twenty-two, new circuits, double weekends at the same tracks, empty grandstands. Formula 1 existed inside a “bubble” — with strict testing protocols, reduced personnel and an atmosphere in which the usual paddock luxury gave way to something like a field camp.
For the midfield teams, the pandemic season opened an unexpected window. The development freeze imposed to cut costs meant the gap between the leaders and the chasers shifted more slowly than usual. And the shortened, crowded calendar increased the likelihood of chaotic races — wet ones, crash-strewn ones, races shaped by unusual strategies. A Renault podium remained unlikely, but its odds rose from “almost impossible” to “with the right set of circumstances.”
Ricciardo spent the first half of the season steady but without a breakthrough. The points kept coming, fourth and fifth places appeared now and then, but the top three remained a long way off. Mercedes dominated with frightening monotony, Red Bull with Max Verstappen picked up the scraps left by the Silver Arrows, while Racing Point, with a car suspiciously similar to the previous year’s Mercedes, also claimed the role of “best of the rest.” The bet with Abiteboul was beginning to look like a lovely but safe joke.
The Eifel Grand Prix was a round that had not originally been on the calendar. The Nürburgring returned to the Formula 1 schedule for the first time since 2013, filling one of the gaps created by cancelled races in Asia and America. The weather in the Eifel mountains in October is a character in its own right: fog, cold, rain that can begin and end within a single lap. Friday practice was cancelled outright because of fog — the medical helicopters could not take off, and without them the regulations prohibit sessions from being held. The teams took to the track effectively blind, with minimal data.
The race on October 11, 2020 unfolded the way season-changing races do. Lewis Hamilton led confidently and took his ninety-first victory, equalling Michael Schumacher’s record. Verstappen finished second. And third — after the retirement of Valtteri Bottas and trouble for several other contenders — across the line came Daniel Ricciardo.
Third place. A podium. Renault’s first as a works team since its return in 2016. Ricciardo’s first since 2018, when he was still racing for Red Bull. At the finish, the Australian shouted over the radio as if he had won the championship. In a spectatorless paddock, in the cold German October, wearing the mask he pulled down for the podium ceremony — the emotion was real, free of corporate polish.
Naturally, journalists asked about the bet immediately after the race. Ricciardo replied with his trademark grin: the wager was “real,” and he was already thinking about the design. The hint was clear — the image would be tied to the place where the podium had happened, “with a German flavour.” What exactly that meant — lederhosen, a Bavarian pretzel, a portrait of Schumacher, the outline of the Nürburgring? — Ricciardo did not say, leaving room for speculation. That evening, Abiteboul looked simultaneously happy and doomed, which was perhaps the perfect expression for a man whose team had just achieved a historic result at the cost of a square centimetre of his own skin.
I like that Ricciardo did not reveal the design right away. In a world where every moment is monetised instantly, he let the pause linger — and that pause itself became part of the story. The internet, naturally, exploded with suggestions. Fans drew sketches, proposing everything from the Renault logo to a cartoon of Ricciardo himself in lederhosen. The bet became a collective entertainment: for a couple of weeks, the paddock, long steeped in technical disputes and politics, switched over to pure joy.
That podium, though, carried a slightly bitter aftertaste. Ricciardo already knew he was leaving Renault: the McLaren contract had been signed, the announcement made. The team’s first podium in nine years came in the farewell season of the driver who had believed in it — and was now departing. Abiteboul made no public attempt to hide his disappointment at losing Ricciardo, and the Nürburgring podium became both the high point of their partnership and its ending.
And then the story paused — for almost a year. In January 2021, Cyril Abiteboul left Renault. The team was renamed Alpine F1 Team, and management passed to other people. Abiteboul left quietly, without grand statements, and all but dissolved from Formula 1’s public sphere.
In interviews during 2021, Ricciardo returned to the wager several times. He said the design had been chosen, that he was in touch with Abiteboul and that the tattoo would be done. But the months passed, with no photos or reports from a tattoo studio, and the bet began to settle into that vague state where neither side seems to be backing out of its obligations, yet neither is in any hurry to fulfil them.
The resolution came at the end of November 2021, a few days before the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Abiteboul finally went under the needle — in London, with Ricciardo present. Ricciardo first posted photos on social media, then the full video. On Abiteboul’s calf appeared a honey badger, the Australian’s long-standing personal totem, and a stylised Renault diamond — the team that had called him in and that he had ultimately left.
“I was worried it had dragged on for so long that it was becoming irrelevant,” Ricciardo admitted. “But I think everyone was just happy.” As a keepsake, he took up the tattoo machine himself and inked the tattoo artist with a “3” — “pretty terrible, but yeah.”
Formula 1’s 2020 season unfolded against a backdrop of empty grandstands, COVID tests and a general sense of fragility. Drivers lived in isolation, teams worked with reduced crews, podium ceremonies took place in masks. In that sterile, anxious context, the tattoo story became something like an open window in a stuffy room — a reminder that sport is made by living people.
Formula 1 loves its legends of wagers and promises. Bernie Ecclestone knew how to make deals on a handshake, with almost no paperwork, while McLaren boss Zak Brown got a Monza-themed tattoo to mark Ricciardo’s Italian victory. But the Ricciardo-Abiteboul bet fell into a special category: it was public, specific and tied to a sporting result that seemed nearly unattainable. When the unattainable happened — at a cold Nürburgring, in the race where Hamilton equalled Schumacher’s record — the joke became a debt, and that debt was eventually paid.
A year, a London tattoo studio — and the promise spoken out loud over a couple of beers was fulfilled after all.