Toro Rosso expecting 'competitive' Kvyat to return

Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost says he expects a competitive Daniil Kvyat to return to Formula 1 next year. The Russian will fill one of Toro Rosso's race seats for 2019, while it is not yet clear who will race alongside him.

It will be Kvyat's third stint at Toro Rosso, having first raced for them in 2014. After spending just over a year at senior team Red Bull, Kvyat was dropped back down to Toro Rosso where he remained until towards the end of the 2017 season.

Having spent a year working with Ferrari, Kvyat will return to F1 as a race driver, but Tost says that he is expecting the 24-year-old to be competitive: “He is relaxed, I have the feeling he is much more measured that the year before. I expect a competitive Daniil Kvyat,” he said.

“We all know he is very fast, that he has a very high level of natural speed and he just has to sit in the car, push the right-hand pedal and you will see he will show good results because he can do it. We all know this.”

While Kvyat admitted that he was happy to be back, he acknowledged that there is a lot of work ahead of him: “I’m very positive now, very happy to be back,” he stated. “But you cannot be happy forever. You have to acknowledge there is a lot of work ahead.

"I’ve been working on myself a lot this year. It’s very important I think to be in a good mental window with yourself, and this year, it’s exactly what I was focusing on, even though some days it wasn’t certain that I was going to be coming back. Once I knew, I was confident that it was going to be very positive.”