Christian Horner teases Daniil Kvyat over regular crashes in F1 career

Christian Horner has had a light-hearted jab at his former driver Daniil Kvyat over the number of crashes he made in his F1 career.

Of his 110 starts, Kvyat has failed to finish in 20 F1 races and while some of those can be explained by mechanical issues, a fair portion of them were a result of driver mistakes.

It was perhaps this tendency to produce costly crashes that ultimately led to him losing his Red Bull seat with the Russian’s last race for the team coming with a first lap collision between himself and Sebastian Vettel.

This unfortunate ability was referenced by Horner who struggled to remember which crash he was listening to as part of a quiz.

Featuring on Red Bull’s own Talking Bull podcast, Horner was asked to identify drivers by a short audio clip and one of them happened to be Kvyat.

The Red Bull boss had no trouble identifying the voice but was stumped over a different aspect, where was the crash?

“That was Daniil Kvyat,” Horner said with a smile. “The question is where does he crash? Because he had a few of them.”

Horner eventually plumped for Kvyat’s 2016 crash in Sochi which proved to be the incorrect answer as it was from the 2015 US Grand Prix.

The light-hearted jab came at the same time Kvyat has been vocalising some of his complaints in regards to his treatment at Red Bull.

The Russian suggested Red Bull had “stabbed me in the back” when they replaced him with Max Verstappen in 2016.

“I felt really betrayed at that moment,” he told theTrack Limits podcast. “It was a stab in the back and that’s life, you get stabbed in the back sometimes you know, it’s normal.

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“Now it’s the past. I have another good career in racing so part of me of course is very thankful to Red Bull. The other part of me is still very unhappy with it.”

Horner did not refer to Kvyat’s comments directly but did speak about how crashes can affect a driver’s confidence and talked about how he tried to encourage drivers going through a rough patch.

“I think it’s a matter of just talking openly and honestly with your drivers or engineers or any member of the team,” the longest serving team principal said. “Because confidence is a key factor in any sport or in any walk of life.

“And I think that’s something you have to feel for yourself but you have to feel that people have got the confidence and support around you. I think if you feel that, then it’s more probable that you’re going to deliver to your highest standard, knowing that people have got belief and faith in you.”

Seemingly a lack of faith is what most hurt Kvyat about his Red Bull departure as he commented that he helped the team through their “sh*ttiest times”, only to be dumped.

“From Toro Rosso to Red Bull, not easy of course,” he said. “It’s a different F1 team, the top and the midfield has a different mentality. Also very difficult times for the team. Everyone was very stressed. It was the opposite of now, now they have a dominant car at the time it was one of their worst cars.

“Christian [Horner] wasn’t happy. Helmut [Marko] wasn’t wasn’t happy. So they were difficult times at Red Bull.

“So to basically help them get through their sh*ttiest times and then they get rid of you… But whatever, it was still a great chapter.”