Daniil Kvyat, AlphaTauri, Red Bull Ring, 2020

Kvyat wishes car breakthrough had come earlier after late-season gains

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In the round-up: Daniil Kvyat says his 2021 F1 season would have been very different if the breakthrough AlphaTauri made with his car late in the year had come sooner.

What they say

Having started outside the top 10 throughout the first dozen races in 2020, Kvyat only failed to line-up inside the top 10 at one of the final five rounds. He has been replaced by Yuki Tsunoda at AlphaTauri after being outscored 75-32 by team mate Pierre Gasly last season:

Look, I always push the limit and of course you want to have a good feeling with the car, the right feeling with your car. It’s been improving, it’s been making me push the car harder.

My approach hasn’t changed this year. I never really went into some bad negative snowball or anything. It [would’ve been] easy, after the first few races when we realised the car is really not suiting you, to say ‘okay, whatever, I give up, I don’t care about this season anymore’. But I kept pushing and also this last race proves that I just kept pushing until the end. I never give up.

It’s a shame to understand a little bit like this. If we started the year with this kind of car it would be a very different story.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

Mercedes aren’t likely to be caught this year, reckons XMG:

Given the multitude of changes for next season (2022) I doubt any team is going to be doing any meaningful development throughout the year so whoever starts ahead is likely to stay there.

In theory Mercedes has the advantage here given they dedicated almost all of last season towards developing the ’21 car, but they’ve also got to (re)implement conventional front suspension and stand to lose more than any other team in that regard.

I expect they will be ahead nonetheless and probably quite comfortably too. 2022 can’t come quick enough, I just hope the racing’s better too!
XMG (@sparkyamg)

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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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10 comments on “Kvyat wishes car breakthrough had come earlier after late-season gains”

  1. I heard he almost won last place,
    great comeback. He won’t be back, because Formula One is moving in another direction. Hard on the people we know little about. This sport seems to promote success and Winning. After all it is a car race. The masses know little about Kvyat. His time in F1 was at the same time that Lewis Hamilton dominated the sport. So little was expected but he leaves with all his parts. Better than some. Formula One was not his destiny.

  2. Reading through a June 1971 edition of Modern Motor magazine in Australia, I came across an advert for Renault, which gives the Ocon drive at Monte Carlo some context.
    Apparently the Alpines scored 1st, 2nd and equal 3rd which was the first time one manufacturer had taken out the first 3 positions in the rally, and of the 257 starters only 30 finished!

    I have emailed it to Keith a copy of the advert so hopefully he can post it up?

  3. Kvyat quote from after the race last year isn’t it? A chance to remember his F1 career I guess. Recovered from a rough start, torpedo & madman etc. (some Vettel hyperbole translated into a surprising post-nest-exit instinctive maternal reaction by RB that must have spun Kvyat’s head) to a quite good finish to his second stint in the game.
    I guess if he had a sugared oligarch floating around, we’d already know it, but on the off chance he finds one I think he’d make a pretty good development driver/tutor-for-an-up-and-comer in a tail-end team.

  4. I’m looking forward to a quote from Austria last year !

    Social media is advertising, which I don’t like to see more here.

  5. Wouldn’t have made a difference for him regarding this year because of Tsunoda.

  6. 97% efficiency is extremely impressive.
    Just a pity they haven’t found a way to get the power and the race kinetic energy of an F1 car into a lighter battery.
    To get to 1000bhp or the same total kinetic energy of F1, FE will need battery packs which alone will be heavier than an F1 car.
    Thus for now 300km GP races will not suit electric cars until the batteries improve a lot or they move to slot car racing.

  7. Kvyat barely got a shot in the Red Bull as a very young driver. He didn’t do terrible, but had a much better talent behind him. I’m glad Red Bull put him at least in the Torro Rosso, and even brought him back after he got dumped a second time. He had an alright 2019, and while he finished one spot lower in the standings in 2020 his only retirement was the failure in Britain and overall scored points about every other race in a very bloated and competitive mid-field.

    The fact is, there’s only so many seats in F1, and there’s always new untapped talent knocking on the door. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 20 year old prodigy or a still young 26 year old experienced veteran of the series….you’re expendable. Especially if your replacement on the main team wins right away, and your teammate on the secondary team wins.

    It’s a cruel series sometimes, and there’s many drivers that have had the talent to compete left to the wayside. There’s no doubt that Kvyat can handle his business behind a Formula 1 car, but Red Bull is looking toward the future and anything short of him dominating Gasly this past season he was going to get the boot for a new talent. I hope the guy doesn’t dwell on “what could have beens” etc. Not many drivers…not accomplished open wheel drivers can say they’ve gotten a Formula One podium. He can take his talents to another series and have a heck of a career elsewhere, it’s not like his resume is terrible.

  8. Re Zhou: From my calculations, he needs P5 or higher in F2 to get the required points for a Super License.

    1. He had a bit of unreliability which probably cost him one full-points victory, and the race that he did win ended up being only half points. Add these points and he would have been in the picture.

  9. If he wanted to stay in the Red Bull family he needed to comfortably beat Gasly and in some races last year he was a long way behind. Not surprised to hear him blaming the car, it probably explains why he’ll never get to that next level as a driver. Still he has shown enough in F1 to be an asset in another racing series I think.

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