Daniel Ricciardo is back: 'I'm probably a bit of a wuss'

It was as if Daniel Ricciardo had never left. Chuckling with neighbour Lewis Hamilton during the press conference, showing his familiar smile to everyone again. Return number two of Ricciardo's season is one with question marks. After all, has the Australian really fully recovered from his hand fracture? The ultimate test will follow in his beloved Austin at the US Grand Prix.

Ricciardo had driven two Grands Prix after his (forced?) sabbatical before disaster struck. In the Zandvoort banking, the AlphaTauri driver ended up in the tyre wall. At this moment, Ricciardo still had his hands on the wheel, and that proved to be a costly decision. A hand fracture, an operation, and five missed Grands Prix were the result.

"I'm well. I'm very happy to be back," Ricciardo said in the press room of the Circuit of the Americas on Thursday. "The hand's good, and I just want to get back to it now. So it's nice. People ask me about it. It's nice, but I've also answered a lot of questions about it," laughed the AlphaTauri driver.

While Liam Lawson replaced him, Ricciardo was busy rehabilitating. "I would say tougher than I thought but I'm probably a bit of a wuss as well so maybe not tougher than I thought. I think it was really just when the accident happened and we were aware what bone broke. They seemed fairly okay with that bone in terms of it's a relatively easy one to kind of fix."

But: "When we got the surgery done in Spain, we got further checks done, and the break was a lot worse than it first seemed. So I think that's what took a lot longer for the recovery and probably made it a little more painful for myself," Ricciardo said.