Red Bull’s Daniil Kvyat felt that he and his team got the most out of the Grand Prix, on a track whose layout, with two long straights at the beginning and end of the lap, didn’t appear to play into the strengths of the engined RB11.
The Russian originally posted the seventh fastest time in on Saturday but was promoted to sixth due Valterri Bottas’ red flag discrepancy. He was passed by the Finn into turn one, who then left Kvyat to fight with over sixth, but the Force India got the jump on the ex-Toro Rosso at the first round of stops, leaving the 21-year old to complain about a lack of straight line speed when looking for a reason as to why he was unable to challenge his Mercedes-shod opponent.
“Today we extracted pretty much the maximum out of what we could have done. Unfortunately, we got undercut by Force India at the first pit stop which compromised our race a bit. After that, I was following Hulkenberg all the time and it was quite hard to find a place to overtake. We were stuck behind him trying to attack, but they were controlling us in a straight line so it wasn’t easy, I got in DRS range a couple of times, but it didn’t really help.”
Ultimately, though, Formula One’s second Russian driver was upbeat about the result at the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace, and expressed his satisfaction with his points haul, taking him onto 94 points in 2015 and ten ahead of his comparatively experienced teammate Daniel Ricciardo.
“Anyway, we have to be happy with those 6 points at this track. All in all we had a very controlled qualifying yesterday and a controlled race today, so it couldn’t have been much better.”
