Kvyat's Bahrain qualifying hampered by operational error

The Bahrain Grand Prix weekend had looked promising for Daniil Kvyat, the Russian in the top 10 in both Friday practice sessions and ending Q1 in 12th ahead of Red Bull’s Pierre Gasly. But it all went wrong in the second part of qualifying…

When Kvyat was sent out for his final run, he asked the team “have you sent me out on used tyres?” He waited several corners for a response before asking for a radio check. The engineer confirmed the radio was working, before giving him information about the cars around him.

They then called him back into the pits at the end of the out-lap to which Kvyat asked: “Do we change tyres? His engineer responded: “No, that was it, we don’t have time.” Kvyat replied: “What was that guys?”

Speaking about the incident after the session, Kvyat said: “I aborted the second run in Q2 because there was an operational issue with the car. Was it the tyres? Maybe yes, maybe not…

“Maybe it’s frustrating, maybe it’s not. To be honest we have to work on it. We have to understand it and see what happened. Without doing the last run I can’t fully judge my qualifying. I didn’t do the last run so I cannot compare with Alex [Albon, his team mate].”

Despite the setback, Kvyat remained positive about his chances in the race given the performance he has shown so far this weekend. “We scored points in Australia and I’m confident we can score points tomorrow,” he said. “I’m pretty confident, I think we can use this position to our advantage but it’s not like we just turn up and go.

“We start 15th so we need to be realistic, we need to do our race and see what we can get out of it. Hopefully we can make something good out of it, so we’ll try our best.”