First-lap fracas makes for a long day for Daniel in Mexico

Contact with Valtteri Bottas at the first corner made for a pointless afternoon for Daniel, with a promising qualifying leading to a frustrating 12th-place finish. 

A long wait, the longest run to the first corner and a short ending – that was the succinct version of Daniel's Mexican Grand Prix, with a Turn 1 incident scuppering any chance of a strong finish and leading to a 12th-place result.

Mexico hadn't appeared on the calendar since 2019, and with the longest distance from the start-finish line to the first corner of any track on the calendar (1063 metres), action was almost guaranteed at the first big braking zone of the race; unfortunately for Daniel, it was the tyre of action he would have happily done without.

Daniel made a strong start from seventh on the grid, arrowed down the inside into Turn 1 and slightly locked up, but was under control when he came across Valtteri Bottas' Mercedes, which had ceded the lead to Red Bull's Max Verstappen into the first turn. Daniel tapped the back of Bottas, spinning the Mercedes and breaking his own front wing, and while the race stewards didn't investigate the clash and deemed it a racing incident, it ended the race to all intents and purposes for Daniel. 

"At the end of the day, I think it’s just a lap one incident," Daniel says. 

"The start was good and those first few hundred metres were looking positive. I think we were potentially in P4, and in a split-second it changes." 

Daniel limped back to the pits, had his nose changed and his car fitted with hard tyres, and then settled in for a race of hoping an opportunity may present itself to climb back into the points. But as is so often the case in Mexico, the remaining 70 laps were largely processional, and with a slightly damaged floor and resultant loss of downforce from the contact, the points proved a bridge too far, Daniel not spending one lap inside the top 10 the rest of the way. 

"The first few hundred metres down to Turn 1, they're always fun here because there's so many slipstreams, it's dusty, it's kind of chaos," Daniel explains. 

"But under braking, I think there was room on the inside with (Red Bull's Sergio) Perez, and it's one of those ones where if you don't go for a gap, someone else will and you can easily just get swallowed up. 

"It was a reasonable bit of space to go for and it felt reasonably under control in the first part of braking but as we got closer to the apex, everyone starts to close in. At the last moment I locked a little bit and obviously Valtteri has come across, so we hit … I apologised to him. 

"That was the race, so it was a long 70 laps after that. For a few seconds it looked awesome." 

Daniel retained eighth place in the world championship with 105 points, and felt there wasn't a lot to gain from over-analysing a small moment with big consequences. 

"These ones are pretty painful because you have to endure the race and hope something happens, but nothing really did," he says. 

Daniel's 12th place, along with a 10th-place finish for teammate Lando Norris, saw McLaren relinquish third in the constructors' championship to Ferrari, who scored 18 points in Mexico between Charles Leclerc (fifth) and Carlos Sainz (sixth). 

Ferrari now leads McLaren in the teams' race by 13.5 points with four races remaining in 2021, the first of which comes this Sunday with the Sao Paulo Grand Prix. Daniel's career results have taken a turn for the better in Brazil after a rough start, with his past three visits to Interlagos all yielding top-six finishes.