'Strange times at a soaking Spa for Daniel’

A season-best fourth-place finish represented a strong start to the second half of Daniel's year, but HOW it happened – well, it's complicated …

Just when Daniel thought he had seen it all in Formula One – a reasonable assumption given Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix doubled as his 200th race – a curveball came his way at the legendary Spa-Francorchamps circuit, where the history books will show him as finishing in fourth place.

That's the easy takeaway from the 12th round of 2021; how we got there is a long story with a short ending.

Rewind to Saturday qualifying, and Daniel tiptoed superbly through the spray from incessant rain to qualify fourth, his best effort in McLaren orange to date, and one that owed itself to a last-gasp lap of 2min 00.864secs as the final car over the finish line as Q3 ended. As it turned out, those 121 seconds were worth much more than a second-row start alongside reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes. 

"We made some changes after FP3 to try to help me out a bit in the wet, so Q2 was a good step," Daniel says. 

"Q3 – there were a few lock-ups and it wasn't the cleanest lap, but it was a lap that I needed to get in there at the end, and I was definitely happy enough with it."

The weather on Saturday, already typical of Spa, stepped it up a notch on Sunday as the rain teemed down, delaying the scheduled 3pm start. The field completed two formation laps 25 minutes later, but the race was immediately red-flagged and the drivers returned to their garages and waited … and waited. 

Just after 6.15pm local time – more than three hours after the race was set to begin and in treacherous conditions – the drivers returned to the track behind the safety car to complete two full laps before a further red flag was shown. At close to 7pm, the race was called off.

With no overtaking possible as every lap was run behind the safety car, Daniel's fourth in qualifying became fourth in the race, his best result yet for McLaren. But in keeping with the strangeness of Sunday, only half-points were awarded for the world championship, as the race hadn't completed 75 per cent of its scheduled 44-lap distance. So, Daniel banked six points for fourth place rather than the usual 12, but the haul did vault him past AlphaTauri's Pierre Gasly into eighth in the drivers' standings. 

It was the first time Daniel had competed in a race where half the usual points were awarded; it's happened just six times in F1 history, most recently before last Sunday at the 2009 Malaysian Grand Prix.

Belgium 2021 now goes down as the shortest race in F1 history; as ways to commemorate his 200th race milestone go, it was about as strange of an afternoon as you could get. 

"It was just constant rain, so it never allowed a dry line to appear," Daniel explains. 

"Twenty cars would go over but the next lap, that line would be gone and the aquaplaning would be no different. I don't know if it's the type of bitumen or that these cars kick up so much spray, but it was just so hard to see. If there's aquaplaning you need to see where you're going to avoid the rivers, so it was a double-edged sword. It would have been stupid, simple as that. 

"The best of the conditions were around 2.30 on the laps to grid, and by 3 o'clock it started to get bad. At the end there after 6 o'clock it was just as bad. I wasn't mad at them for trying, but there was no other option really." 

Fortunately, the good news is that nobody has to wait long for the next race – and it's a new spin around an old favourite that greets the drivers at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort next Sunday. 

The Dutch GP hasn't been on the calendar since 1985, and it's been a long, long while since Daniel raced in anger at the flowing, narrow circuit that sits beside the North Sea. 

"I've not raced there since F3 in 2009, so it's a long time ago and I don't remember anything!" he laughs.

"In F1 it's going to gnarly, it's going to be fast, ballsy and really intense in qualifying. I'm looking forward to go to a new destination, and the Dutch fans are awesome."