For the next few weeks, as we await the return of racing, Motorsport Week is delving into the archives to search out the first time that our grid of 2020 F1 racers stepped into top-level machinery in a public forum.
Aside from his gap year spent as Ferrari’s development driver Daniil Kvyat has spent his entire decade-long single-seater career with Red Bull.
He steadily rose through the ranks, often with and alongside fellow Red Bull protégé Carlos Sainz Jr., and in mid-2013 he was competing in the GP3 Series.
That season the young driver test was held at Silverstone, after the British Grand Prix, and Red Bull called up Kvyat to trial Toro Rosso’s STR8.
It was a slightly inauspicious start to Kvyat’s life behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car as his run plan was truncated by an earlier issue, and once it was his turn he managed only 22 laps before spinning into the gravel.
But Kvyat’s success in both Formula 3 and GP3 that season propelled him to the doorstep of Formula 1 and by the end of the campaign he had made his FP1 debut in anticipation of graduating in 2014.
Almost seven years later Kvyat is still at the Faenza-based team, via a year-and-a-bit at Red Bull, a second disastrous spell at Toro Rosso, and a season working behind-the-scenes at Ferrari.
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