After the disappointment of qualifying twentieth and last for the Spanish Grand Prix, the race on Sunday was a vast improvement for Daniil Kvyat, and he secured a ninth place finish and two championship points.
The Scuderia Toro Rosso driver drove strongly throughout at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, and survived a penultimate lap clash with Kevin Magnussen as the duo battled over ninth, with the Haas F1 Team driver coming off worse and acquiring a puncture in the incident.
Kvyat knows they will need to look into the reasons why they struggled so badly on Saturday as they will not be able to recover as well as they did on other circuits, but the Russian was delighted with his recovery drive on Sunday.
“It feels great to finish in the points today, I’m proud of myself and my engineers!” said Kvyat. “We didn’t give up after a difficult day yesterday and followed a great strategy to go from last to P9!
“Of course we need to analyse and find out what happened yesterday, because we can’t afford qualifying sessions like this to happen anymore, but today’s race was fun.
“I was able to overtake many cars at a circuit where normally it’s not easy to do so and enjoyed every lap of the race a lot, so I’m very happy. These points are very welcome after a tough weekend! Thanks everybody!”
