"For me, it was a feeling of, 'I knew I could do this, and now I've done it'. I believed it could be done, so it was nice to confirm that. I had a chance to win and took it, I didn't choke, I didn't freeze at the crucial time. I didn't crack under the pressure of being about to win my first race. I felt I belonged there. "People definitely look at you differently after you win. I remember [two-time world champion] Fernando Alonso coming up to me after the race and offering his congratulations, and I'd not had much of a relationship with him to that point. I obviously massively respected him for what he'd done, so that was big. [Former F1 driver turned TV pundit] Martin Brundle interviewed me after the race and said, 'You've made it, you're now one of those guys', meaning that I was a Formula One race winner. That was cool." Six races into his tenure with Renault, Ricciardo's chances of adding to those seven wins are, for the short-term at least, slim to none. Renault finished last season as the unofficial best of the rest in F1's tightly compacted midfield, rarely a threat to challenge the front-running trio of Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull on pace, but quick enough to keep the rest in the rear-view mirror. So far in 2019, Renault has struggled to cement that standing, sitting eighth in the constructors' championship after the first third of the season. The 29-year-old's first race for Renault in Australia in March was over seconds after it began, when an off-track excursion soon after the start smashed Ricciardo's front wing and prompted an early retirement. Things have only intermittently been better since, a seventh place in China in April his best return so far as he sits 13th in the drivers' standings. Ricciardo knew that his short-term results might take a hit as he embedded himself into his new team, the French car manufacturer embarking on a long-term plan to muscle in on the sport's elite. While the competitor in him can be excused for some frustration with Renault's progress, he says the process has kept him calm.

"People are so quick to judge … this is a long-term project, not something you can say was a success or a failure after six races," he reasons. "I know that the more time I get in this car, the more I'll get used to it and the results will follow. When you've driven for the same team like I did for five years and you know the characteristics of the car back to front, even if that car changes slightly year to year, you take that for granted. Daniel Ricciardo celebrating his first grand prix victory in 2014, after winning for Red Bull in Montreal. Credit:EPA "We're six races in, so when I hear after a good result or qualifying that 'the old Ricciardo is back' … he didn't go anywhere! As I get more bedded in here, it's getting better and I feel I can start to show something. I'm keeping pretty chilled about it. "The mood is where it needs to be – there's definitely some races where we've been frustrated because we could be doing better, but that's good because the passion and the drive is there."

Both Renault and Ricciardo were left to rue the most recent race in Monaco, where the Australian won for Red Bull in 2018. Ricciardo has always shone on the sun-kissed Monte Carlo streets, and produced a brilliant lap in qualifying where he left mere millimetres between his yellow Renault and the unforgiving steel armco, starting the race from sixth on the grid. He ambushed the Haas of Kevin Magnussen at the first corner to jump to fifth, but a decision to pit for tyres while the race was neutralised behind the safety car proved costly, the loss of track position seeing a potentially strong points haul evaporate into a nondescript ninth-place finish. It was an opportunity squandered in a season that has offered precious few. "In qualifying I felt I put everything on the table that I needed to," he says. "The race, the start was great, I got past Magnussen and I was up with that lead battle of the cars we were fighting with. Being fifth was obviously a pretty big result at the time. With the safety car, it was quite a late call to come into the pits and it didn't work out, it wasn't in hindsight for us the right call. "We had our head down after that knowing it could have been a big result for the team. But our pace was really good and we'd shown signs. So we've got it, we just need to put it all together. We probably still haven't had a perfect weekend."

With the seventh round of the season taking place at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal this weekend, it's not only been slim pickings for Renault; nine of the 10 teams this year have been forced to sate their hunger pangs with the rare crumbs being spilled by Mercedes. The sport's dominant force for the past five years, Mercedes has gone up a level in 2019, with only the last race in Monaco, where Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel finished second, denying reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton and Australian Grand Prix victor Valtteri Bottas a clean sweep of 1-2 finishes this season. Rather than criticise Mercedes for making the sport predictable, Ricciardo is of a different view. Perfection might be a turn-off for some, but as Ricciardo sees it, Mercedes' excellence should be lauded, and he believes the opposition needs to step up rather than the sport being dumbed down. "What's weird is that the team that everyone's been chasing is the team that seems to have made more progress than the others," he says of Mercedes. "I've not been in their battles and I've been focusing on the midfield for now, which has been as tight as anything. But criticising Mercedes for winning everything is the wrong way to look at it, even if it is predictable.