'One to forget': Daniel stuck outside the points in Monaco

Qualified 12th, finished 12th – in a race where not much happened anywhere else, it was a high-speed stalemate for Daniel in Monte Carlo.

It's not where you start, it's where you finish; that old saying holds true most of the time, but most Grands Prix circuits aren't Monaco – which Daniel was left to lament after a race around his favourite circuit that began after a 12th-place result in qualifying, and ended in the same position 78 laps and nearly 100 minutes later. 

The die was cast for Daniel when he couldn't crack the top 10 in Thursday practice, and he missed Q3 on Saturday by 0.189secs to start the race from the sixth row of the grid. 

By the time the lights went out there were 10 cars ahead of him rather than 11 following the pre-race withdrawal of pole-sitter Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) with a failed driveshaft, but Daniel finished lap one in 13th place after being jumped by Kimi Raikkonen (Alfa Romeo) and Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) in the typical Monaco first-lap melee. 

It was then a case of settling in, being ready for a safety car to spice things up, and hoping for the best – and, strangely for Monaco where a safety car had made an appearance nine times in the previous 10 years, none of that came to fruition. 

Daniel pitted on lap 36 to discard his medium tyres for hards until the end of the race, gained a place back to 12th when Fernando Alonso (Alpine) pitted on lap 45, and then stayed there for the remainder of a processional race, finishing two seconds behind Raikkonen, and three seconds behind the Finn's teammate Antonio Giovinazzi, who claimed the final world championship point for 10th. 

Such is the unique nature of Monaco – and the outlier of a lowly result after a breakthrough display in Spain a fortnight earlier – that Daniel felt there was little to be gained by over-analysing what he called "a weekend to forget". 

"Car 4 (Lando Norris) and the rest of the team got a podium (for third place) so I obviously want to congratulate them," Daniel says. 

"They got it right … I don't even know if we got it wrong, it just never got going. We didn't do a crazy different set-up … I'm not trying to be too clever with that. It shows the pace is there with the car. But a strange weekend from the get-go and one to forget. I'm not going to over-analyse this one. 

"This weekend was more of an anomaly with such a big difference. When it's a weekend like this and when it's as far off as it was, it's probably best to step away for a few days.

"Just move forward for Baku and go from there." 

Like Monaco, the Baku City Circuit, home to the upcoming Azerbaijan Grand Prix on June 6, is a street track … and that's where the similarities end. A mixture of 90-degree corners that lead into a narrow section that winds its way through some of the city's historic buildings, the six-kilometre lap ends with an intense 20-second full-throttle blast that can see cars hit 370km/h in the slipstream of a rival. 

It's a circuit that, in four F1 visits, has never thrown up a dull race, as Daniel can attest after winning a chaotic debut for the event on the F1 calendar in 2017.