Jules Bianchi "would have been at a top team and a race-winner" in Formula 1 by this point in his career, Daniel Ricciardo believes.
The Renault driver paid tribute to the Frenchman, who tragically died in July 2015 of injuries sustained at the previous year's Japanese Grand Prix, as he listed five drivers he considered the most underrated that he's raced with.
Among those were some interesting names, including former Sauber and current IndyCar driver Marcus Ericsson and Roberto Merhi, who raced for Manor Marussia in 2015.
But Ricciardo's motivation for adding Bianchi was slightly different, as he explained.
“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,” he wrote in a diary post released on social media.
“You think of his drive in that Marussia in Monaco in 2014, the team’s first points… 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. 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.”
Bianchi's obvious talent saw him signed up to the Ferrari Driver Academy in 2009 and though he raced at the back of the grid with Marussia, a future move at the Scuderia was believed to have already been agreed.
“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," Ricciardo continued.
"It’s another part of what makes his story so sad because he would have been in a top team and a race-winner by now for sure."
Instead, fate would intervene, but the remarkable part of the Bianchi story is that it was essentially taken over by his own godson, Charles Leclerc.
“In some ways, I feel Charles is doing now what Jules would have been doing, it’s like Charles is the delayed version of what Jules would have done with the success he’s having," Ricciardo concluded.
