Once the idea for a Visa Cash App Red Bull Academy Programme x Enchanté collaboration was locked in, Daniel Ricciardo’s brand began creating apparel for VCARB’s F1 Academy driver Rafaela Ferreira to wear on and off the track.
The last capsule of the year will drop right in time for the final race on the 2025 F1 Academy schedule: the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
The latest collection began just like any Enchanté production. “The real designers,” as Ricciardo calls them, created a mood board, and Ricciardo gave his thumbs up and thumbs down to ideas. The only difference this time was that Ferreira got to join in on the fun.
The day was captured for an Instagram Reel that was released in August. Ricciardo and Ferreira walk through the Enchanté New York City office, commenting on the jackets and sweatshirts, giving notes on the upcoming collection, and grabbing slices of pizza to eat on a stoop. It looks joyous, and collaborative, but of course it was also tailor-made for Enchanté’s social media. So, I ask Ferreira what it was really like.
“Even with the camera, it was real,” she says. “We were just talking about everything we think [about the capsule].” Ferreira tells me she had met Ricciardo once before, back in 2022 at the São Paulo Grand Prix, during an FIA Girls on Track availability. “I arrived at home and I said, ‘Daniel is what we see on the TV,’” she remembers. “‘He’s really nice!’” But obviously, that was just a quick hello and a photograph. This was different. “The thing I liked the most was that my dad went too, and my dad doesn’t speak English at all,” Ferreira continues, “and he was trying to talk with my dad with some words he knows in Portuguese.”
There is a moment in the Reel when Ricciardo, standing before the moodboard, says to Ferreira, “I know I’m putting you on the spot, but do you have a preference?” The 20-year-old Brazilian driver starts laughing, looking a bit nervous about having to give notes.
“In the first moment, I was a little shy, but then I was like, ‘Yeah, I like this one! Hmm, come back. I like the other one!’” she says, acting it out for me. I ask Ferreira if being a part of the process sparked any future plans for a brand of her own. She smiles. “I really liked it, to be honest. It’s a nice idea,” she says. “I think we can transmit a little bit of what we are through our clothes.”
After Ferreira and Ricciardo sat with the Enchanté team in New York, the designers had their marching orders. Then, they went off and started creating the pieces for the collection.
It's early October and Daniel Ricciardo is at his home in Los Angeles. Behind him, there is a large framed black-and-white photograph of a car positioned in front of the Chateau Marmont façade. His beard is full, and he wears an Enchanté shirt and a trucker hat, backwards, over his dark curly hair.
A year before this Zoom interview, almost to the day, Ricciardo raced in his last grand prix in Singapore. Just ahead of the United States Grand Prix in Austin, Ricciardo — the surprise star of the Formula 1: Drive to Survive era — left the Formula 1 grid for good.
But much earlier, Ricciardo had already started planning his second act. During COVID, he launched Ric3, a clothing brand, and a few years later, in 2023, he created Enchanté. Now, the 36-year-old Aussie spends his time running a burgeoning fashion line. And though he didn’t get his storybook ending in Formula 1, the ever-affable Ricciardo has now somehow managed to tie a bow of sorts on his whole Red Bull Racing/VCARB era.
In May, VCARB announced that Enchanté would be their F1 Academy team apparel sponsor, placing Ricciardo’s company’s name on the car and racing suit.
Throughout the year, Enchanté has released a collection centered around Ferreira: tees, tanks, totes, and “a blue crewneck with my car on the back that we used in Montreal,” Ferreira tells me through a smile. “That was my favorite.”
This week, at the Cosmopolitan, Enchanté will be hosting a popup where they will debut a five-piece capsule as part of their brand-new Speedway collection, which pays homage to throwback racing jackets and vintage NASCAR tees.
“It was obviously not the fairy tale ending; Singapore was hard for me and it definitely played with the heartstrings and all of that. But I think it speaks to the relationships I had with a lot of the team members and people in the business and Red Bull,” Ricciardo tells me of the partnership. “It was nice for me to remove myself, be at peace with 12 months ago, and now come into this with — I don’t know — a bit of warmth.”
“At peace” is a perfect way to describe the Ricciardo who sits before me on my screen. Always smiling and as quick to laugh as you’d expect, he walks me through the path he has taken at Enchanté, and how he got to this place: one where his two-year-old clothing line could claim a spot on an F1 Academy chassis.
His first foray into fashion — though he’d never have called it that at the time — was putting together outfits as a kid in his punk rock/skateboarding phase. Band shirts, skinny jeans, Vans. Then, as a driver, he couldn’t help but notice that the Formula 1 style space was lacking. So, he launched Ric3 during COVID, as his star was rising, and then in 2023, shifted the brand to Enchanté. It was nerve racking, putting himself out there as a fashionista — “I just never want to come across as, ‘Oh, does this guy think he’s like, Versace or something?’” — and it was doubly terrifying to see if his brand could make it without a clear reference to a world-famous driver in the name.
But Ricciardo had a theory: grid style for fans was too “dorky” to wear anywhere but a race. What if he could make a clothing brand that referenced Formula 1 for those in the know and was fashionable enough to rock far from the paddock?
There are easier ways to launch a brand as a driver with a million adoring fans. But Ricciardo has held onto some of that punk rock aesthetic. When I ask what a teenage Daniel would tell the fashion-brand owning mid-30s Daniel, he doesn’t hesitate: “Don’t sell out.”
“Probably, if I printed a t-shirt with just my face on it, all my fans would buy it. They’d be like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s the coolest shirt in the world.’ And I think it’s the worst shirt in the world,” he says, grinning. “So, obviously, with
any business, yes, you want it to be successful. You want it to make profit, because if it’s making profit, it stays alive. But, really, this was a business built around wanting to do cool shit. It wasn’t built around, ‘Oh, let’s get rich.’ That was never the talk. It was never the objective.”
In that vein, Ricciardo pushed against the idea of anything motorsport related at the start. It’s clear now, in retrospect, that Enchanté was a way to assert himself as a full person outside the paddock. “But I was maybe a bit too stubborn,” he explains.
Now, at peace Daniel Ricciardo isn’t so worried about defining himself in opposition to the Formula 1 world in which he bloomed. He loved racing and he still loves motorsport culture. So, why not embrace that part of himself through Enchanté? “And particularly in these upcoming collections, we’re definitely tapping back in.”
I has seen the video of the two drivers and the moodboard before we began talking, but I hadn’t been sure how involved Ricciardo actually was with the day-to-day design. The answer? Very.
He tells me about an Enchanté group chat where the team drops in photo inspiration nearly every day. Ricciardo recently shared a shot of a guy in a small town wearing a vintage t-shirt of a tow-truck company. He also shares photos of him and his dad at race tracks back in the ’90s, hoping to spark an idea for an Enchanté release. “A piece of a collection has never been a surprise to me. I’m always across it,” Ricciardo says. “And sometimes I might push back, but then they’ll push back and say, ‘Look, we think this is right.’ And I surrender.” He starts to laugh. “But there’s always a back and forth.”
Ricciardo is continuously self-depracating about his design chops, stressing that he has no formal training and emphasizing that “real designers” framing. But it would be wrong to read that as a willingness to move to the sideline or sacrifice his core vision.
These last twelve months have been an adjustment, he admits. For 14 years, he lived life at a Formula 1 pace: flights every week, schedules micromanaged down to the minute, a whole team chasing perfection. It was an existence where a hundredth of a second meant the world.
“It can probably frustrate at times, but I think it can also be appreciated. Like, yes, Daniel can be fucking annoying, but he also really cares, and he’s looking at every detail,” Ricciardo says, grinning. “I think it’s just acknowledging that F1 is literally on another planet, and I can keep some things from that, but a lot of it, I just need to let go.”
“Everyday life just does not operate like F1,” he continues, “and if you treat it like that, you will just go crazy.”
It quickly becomes evident that, for Ricciardo, Enchanté is not just a vanity project or a means to stay relevant. He wants to make something that lasts, that is cool, and that is definitely not a shirt with his face on it.
“I’m 36 now, and pretty much my whole life revolved around me. I was the center of attention,” he says. “I had to put myself first for everything: training, diet, what restaurants we go to. Just everything. So now it’s nice to take a step back and give that kind of energy to other people.”
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Rafaela Ferreira wears the racing tee and the tote from the Enchanté x VCARBAP collection.
Ricciardo intentionally created Enchanté to be a not-recognizably Daniel Ricciardo brand. Then, he resisted the easy wins of Daniel Ricciardo gear for racing fans. Now, he’s found himself launching a capsule that actively centers another driver.
If Ricciardo’s post-racing goal is to un-center “Daniel Ricciardo” in his life, this is a beautifully literal way to do it.
When I say as much to Ricciardo, he smiles and then tells me that he is the kind of person who much prefers giving the gift than receiving it on Christmas Day.
He still remembers making it to Formula 1 and seeing his car and his name on gear, and having that pinch-me moment. So, it has been a blast to pay that forward to a young driver like Ferreira.
“F1 Academy is such a new thing, and these girls are starting to make a name for themselves. It’s hard breaking into motorsport as a woman,” Ricciardo says. He hopes the Enchanté sponsorship can help “accelerate” Ferreira’s rise.
“For Rafa to see her stuff on clothing, it’s like, I don’t know … I hope she gets the feeling that I had.”
I ask Ferreira what it meant to see the first piece of her VCARBAP x Enchanté gear early in the season. “In the first moment, I was like, ‘Oh my god, who’s gonna buy it?” she says through a grin.
But now she gets serious. “Then, it was, ‘This is so nice,’” she continues. “I wear it every time I’m traveling and I always say to people, ‘Look it’s my car on my back!’”
