Daniil Kvyat, Toro Rosso, Singapore, 2017

Year away gave Kvyat chance to “regroup”

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In the round-up: Daniil Kvyat describes his year away from Formula 1 after being dropped by Toro Rosso late last year as his chance to “regroup”.

What they say

Kvyat spent a year as Ferrari’s simulator driver before being recalled to Toro Rosso for another season with the team.

First of all of course I’m very pleased to be back. It’s what I wanted and I’m really thankful for this opportunity to Red Bull and obviously also Ferrari. It was a great year for me working for them. I had the chance to regroup everything together and now I’m back where I want to be. It’s going to be an exciting 2019 with Toro Rosso.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

Did Mercedes intend to put Hamilton in front of Bottas through the pit stops in the Russian Grand Prix?

The transcript confirms Mercedes was trying to engineer an ‘overcut’ for Hamilton on Bottas without telling him that was the strategy, seemingly so he could maintain some plausible deniability about the whole thing.

I have no problem with team orders, but this makes invoking Hamilton’s blistering as the justification ring a bit hollow. He was only vulnerable to Vettel because they screwed up their first attempt at trying to swap them around.
@Markzastrow

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Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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19 comments on “Year away gave Kvyat chance to “regroup””

  1. Great COTD! @Markzastrow had not though of that possibility

    1. Yeah, thanks @markzastrow for mentioning it (and thanks Keith for picking it as the CotD).

  2. Make that 1967 for Hulme’s championship win!

    1. any fans of Grand Prix Legends will know this well!

  3. I wonder what will be of this guy if he underperforms again. It’s too much time on a subpar level receiving support.
    Marko said that Vandoorne isn’t fast enough to be on F1, but i just remembered that he scored more than twice as points as Kvyat last year with a much lesser car.

    1. I just looked at the 2017 points for the drivers and found a thing that surprised me a lot. Vandoorne had 13 points compared to alonso’s 17 points. Alonso had just 1 more retirement. Not bad for his first season. Comparing kvyat to vandoorne the latter had 1 more retirement. The most worrying thing for kvyat is how clearly sainz beat him. Compared to kvyat’s 5 points in 14 races sainz collected 55 points during the full season while also having more retirements during the same time frame they were both driving the cars. From all that it really seems kvyat just deflated completely after losing the red bull drive. I don’t see the comparison of kvyat to vandoorne making much sense. But the fact kvyat was beaten and totally destroyed by his team mate in the same car tells the full picture.

      1. Helmut marko said vandorne wasnt getting the seat at TR because he isnt fast enough.

  4. Cyril Abiteboul makes a good point about Ocon’s situation and Wolff’s, frankly, childish reaction to the issue. Mercedes assumed stewardship of Ocon since his F1 debut, and according to the news, they were contributors to the FI rejig. Wolff can’t expect Reanult to wait and see how everything would pan out before settling on a driver lineup for next year. Mercedes shouldn’t be pointing fingers at anyone but themselves.

    1. @sundark – yeah I agree, never thought I’d be here agreeing with Cyril, but honestly, this is a competition, and Renault has to do what they have to do when it comes to driver recruitment.

      This is the story of a Wolff who cried like a boy.

    2. Well, mostly @sundark,@phylyp, except that next time whenever another driver’s manager asks not to pursue a seat, as Renault apparently did here (the sainz deal), that won’t fly,and that probably won’t be pretty. That’s to me the only thing Wolff has a right to feel aggrieved about with Renault.

      1. Clearly, the benefits of signing Ricciardo outweighed the demerits of losing a bit of trust in the paddock. Although I’m not sure there was much trust in the first place.

    3. “I can see that Toto, maybe for the first time in Formula 1, is struggling with something, with the situation.

      That burn tho.

  5. Williams ‘intensively evaluating’ which driver will bring the most money…

  6. Cyril Abiteboul seems an even bigger political snake than Alonso. I wouldn’t recommend anyone doing business with Renault unless you are a F1 driver at the moment they (if ever) have a race winning car. Snake pit this team.

    1. Why, @mayrton.
      Toto is the snake. He failed to finalise the contract with Renault; he failed to find another seat when Ricciardo signed with Renault (he has influence over Force India, Williams, Mercedes); and now is failing to release Ocon so Red Bull can pick him up.
      5 teams and Toto failed Ocon on all of them.

  7. It’s funny, I had almost no desire to watch the Russian GP. Boring track, boring time in the Championship, Russian foreign policy is disgraceful as usual. I didn’t watch it and it seems I won’t regret it

    1. Russian foreign policy is disgraceful as usual

      What the…?
      Despite being nonsense comment, I struggle to see how is it relevant in the first place.

  8. What’s the use? It was a clear-cut case that they broke the rules, so, therefore, the DSQ was entirely justified, and thus, they don’t have a realistic shot at getting the 6th place back, so why even bother wasting their and the FIA’s time with this pointless appeal. Just accept it and move on.
    – I agree with the COTD.

  9. Mercedes were not trying to get Hamilton past Bottas through the pitstop. If they were, it would have been through a target Laptime. What they didn’t want was Bottas giving Vettel too much of a gap such that he could increase his speed massively relative to Hamilton.Bottas stopped 3 laps before Hamilton, there was no way Hamilton was going to come back ahead of him.

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