Daniel Ricciardo(L), Tom Cruise(R)
Credits: IMAGO / Action Plus, IMAGO / Pond5 Images

Back in 2019, Daniel Ricciardo sat down with GQ Sports to review racing movies from the past. Despite being one of his favorite movies growing up — the 1999-Tom Cruise starrer ‘Days of Thunder’ —, his views towards it slightly changed when he became a racing driver.

The honey badger, who last raced in F1 at the 2024 Singapore GP, particularly pointed out one scene from the film he felt was dramatized when one of the cars seemed to zip past a group of back markers. Since the movie was based on NASCAR, which have similar cars, he believes this particular scene was highly unrealistic.

“The way he’s able to obviously, like, passed the back markers effortlessly. So back markers, just the guys more towards the back. Like, they’ve all got, they should all have very similar cars as far as horsepower goes and power output, so how he’s able to, like, come through so easily, that’s very dramatized,” Ricciardo said.

While at it, Ricciardo also gave viewers a lesson on racing rules. Reviewing Days of Thunder, Ricciardo gave real-life examples of what the black flag rule meant amongst other motorsport-related tidbits.

Ricciardo explained black flags and pit signals

During the movie rewatch, Ricciardo came across a scene where the phrase ‘black flag’ was mentioned. Ricciardo explained that a black flag is usually shown to a driver who has done a very dangerous and unsportsmanlike maneuver on the track. This flag signal means that the particular driver has to return to the pits and his race is over.

Ricciardo also walked the fans through a common courtesy in NASCAR racing — a series that he is a self-proclaimed fan of. Sometimes drivers, who are about to come into the pits, will signal to the driver who is ‘on his bumper‘ to avoid a crash.

Funnily enough, Ricciardo compared it to the sport of F1 where there is no chance of giving any visual cues to the drivers behind. Although he can only communicate with his own team through the radio channels, he admitted to giving some of his co-competitors ‘the finger’ when he had the opportunity to.