How good would Jules Bianchi have been had he lived? Sadly, that’s a question that, as with the likes of Francois Cevert, Tom Pryce and Stefan Bellof, can only be answered by conjecture. But Renault’s Daniel Ricciardo says he is sure his friend would have won Grands Prix for a top team by now had fate not intervened.

Bianchi tragically lost his life in 2015, after nine months spent in an induced coma following a freak accident at the previous year’s Japanese Grand Prix while driving for the minnow Marussia team.

But Ricciardo has little doubt that former Ferrari Driver Academy member Bianchi – who Ricciardo famously dedicated his 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix win to – would have achieved big things had he lived.

“He would have been in a top team and a race-winner by now for sure,” Ricciardo wrote on Twitter, in a post where he named five drivers he felt had been underrated during his time in F1.

“It wasn’t like Jules was underrated, but we never got to see him in a top car, so maybe people didn’t appreciate how good he was going to be. You think of his drive in that Marussia in Monaco in 2014, the team’s first point… Monaco is like Macau in that there’s no way to fluke a result there, it was absolutely on merit.

“As a junior through karting, Jules was the guy,” he went on. “We met training at Formula Medicine in Viareggio in Italy and everyone, even at that age when we were all 17, everyone treated him like he was an F1 driver already. I got to know him and we became friends, and I quickly got to know who he was and what he’d done before I arrived in Europe.”

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