Points at Portimao: Daniel recovers to score in Portugal
Daniel makes up for a disappointing qualifying with a swashbuckling start and a solid drive to ninth in Sunday's Portuguese Grand Prix
Despondent on Saturday, determined on Sunday; a succinct but accurate summation of Daniel's drive to ninth at the Portuguese Grand Prix, where he turned a difficult starting slot into a pair of world championship points.
Sunday's mission was to launch a salvage job after being eliminated in Q1 on Saturday, Daniel left in the unusual situation of being a spectator for the last two phases of qualifying for the first time since Japan two years ago.
"Saturday was just frustrating," he says, admitting he used some other adjectives at the time …
"Q1 can be over pretty quickly, you only get a couple of laps. If you get one with traffic and the other is full of mistakes then it's done, so I was pretty upset. You never want to be out in Q1, especially when the car is good enough to be a lot further up."
Daniel slept on that simmering frustration and channelled it into a first-lap launch on Sunday that saw him knocking on the door of the top 10 after just a couple of racing laps. A safety car on lap two for Kimi Raikkonen's accident bunched up the field, giving Daniel a second shot at settling a pre-race pact he'd made with himself.
"My internal target was to pass five cars on lap one – I got three so not quite enough, but then I actually got two more on the restart so I made up for it!" he laughs.
"The long-run pace on the medium tyre was decent and to get into the points was solid. If you look at, say, Carlos (Sainz) and his race – he went from fifth to 11th and I went from 16th to ninth, so little things like that make it seem like a positive day."
Daniel ran a long first stint to advance to fifth before his sole pit stop for hard tyres with 25 laps left. He re-joined 10th, which became ninth when he passed the AlphaTauri of Pierre Gasly on lap 48, and while he ceded position to the Alpine of Fernando Alonso with 15 laps left, he demoted Ferrari's Sainz to reclaim ninth on lap 64 of 66, setting his fastest lap of the race (1min 21.987secs) in the process.
"Learning more about the car over the course of the race was something I took away from the day," he says.
"I'm definitely still driving very, let's say, conscious. I'm needing to talk to myself a lot out there and saying 'come out of the brake', 'do this with the steering' and that sort of thing to myself. The car is needing a very specific style of driving, and it's not quite natural for me at the moment. That'll get better and better, but I can't drive it carefree at the moment and still be quick. If I'm carefree, it's a little slow!"
Sunday marked Formula One's second race at the undulating Algarve International Circuit in Portimao, and just like last year, the track earned rave reviews for its steep rises and descents, although that praise was tempered by a combination of temperatures and tarmac that meant grip was elusive.
"With Portimao, the biggest challenge is the track surface, it's very slippery," Daniel says.
"We thought it might have changed since we were there last year but it was still really slick, and this year our lap times were actually slower than last year. It's slick, and then you start to overdrive and it just exacerbates any mistakes and the time loss. The track is great though, and if it had a gripper surface it would be awesome."
From an unfamiliar track to most comes the one that the drivers can probably lap in their sleep – the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Spain for the Spanish Grand Prix this weekend. It's been the site of pre-season testing for years, but as with everything in these COVID times, Spain comes with a twist this year after pre-season testing wasn't held in Barcelona for the first time since 2014.
"Barcelona should be good – it's definitely a familiar track with fairly normal asphalt and the least number of variables, so that's a place I should be able to tuck in, get on with it and be able to say 'this is what the car needs here' as opposed to having all of these other variables in the way," Daniel says.
"Get on a track that I'm comfortable with – and then go for it!"
