A 'rollercoaster' career
Daniel Kvyat in 2024 he will be protagonist in the WEC as an official Lamborghini driver together with Mirko Bortolotti and Edoardo Mortara. The Russian driver who grew up in Rome left the F1 grid at the end of the 2020 season with three podiums under his belt, two as a Red Bull driver in Hungary in 2015 and in China in 2016 and one at the wheel of Toro Rosso in Germany in 2019.
The career in the Circus of the class of 1994 was a real one roller coaster, with the season off in 2018 where he regenerated himself on the Ferrari simulator, returning with excellent polish at the wheel of the Red Bull junior team in the two-year period 2019-2020. Kvyat made his F1 debut in 2014 after winning the GP3 in 2013. Kvyat picked up Daniel Ricciardo's legacy by teaming up with Jean Eric Vergne, then obtaining promotion to Red Bull in 2015 coinciding with Sebastian Vettel's move to Ferrari.
Kvyat won the seat in F1 by winning the ballot with Carlos Sainz: “We were practically paired in GP3 in the middle of the season before the race in Belgium at Spa and Helmut Marko had informed us that there was a seat up for grabs in F1 for the following championship and this obviously increased the tension between us and even among our fathers – said Kvyat reached by the official F1 website – I won at Spa and Sainz had an accident. At the same time, Marko also wanted to test me in European F3 to see me in action behind the wheel of another type of single-seater and in Austria I obtained three pole positions in front of him. Sainz then tried to do the same by racing in the World Series by Renault 3.5, but was not as successful. When I signed the contract for the move to F1 it was a great satisfaction for me, the culmination of many efforts.”
If at that moment Kvyat had won an important ballot convincing Helmut Marko to prefer him to Carlos Sainz in 2016 the Russian found himself having to compete with a practically impossible mission: “Marko told me that to keep my place I had to stay ahead of Daniel Ricciardo. In China things went well, but then there was what happened in Russia. I think it was the opportunity they were waiting for, sometimes things go like this in F1.”. Marko, in fact, was in a hurry to promote his new pupil Max Verstappen to Red Bull, a team with which he immediately scored on his debut in Barcelona, Spain. In Russia Kvyat was involved in an accident at the start involving Sebastian Vettel, with whom he was already close to colliding in China. Kvyat psychologically suffered the blow of relegation to Toro Rosso, failing to obtain good results either in the remaining races of 2016 or in 2017, only to find himself in 2019 after a year's break as a development driver for Ferrari.
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