Formula 1 returnee Daniil Kvyat established a new benchmark on Wednesday in Barcelona, claiming Toro Rosso's 2019 charger is very much to his liking.
Kvyat was assiduous at work on the third day of pre-season testing at the Circuit de Catalunya, putting in 137 laps as he ran through his team's programmes and continued to familiarized himself with his new mount.
In the last 30 minutes of the afternoon session, a confident Kvyat dialed in some speed before bolting on a set of C5 tyres and taking it up a notch to overhaul Kimi Raikkonen at the top of the time-sheet.
The performance confirmed Kvyat's feeling that he and STR14 are a very good match.
"Honestly, I would like to say it does feel good, it feels to my liking so far," he said at the end of the day.
"Every time I’m out there, I pretty much know what the car is going to do for me so it’s a nice feeling so far.
"Of course it’s early days but the better the start, it’s always welcome. We plan to keep improving and keep working on the car.
"The amount of laps we did and how pretty much on programme we were all the time. We didn’t have any setbacks.
"We were really banging through the programme and we had no major issues. The guys did a great job so I am happy to be a little bit tired today."
©ToroRosso
Red Bull hasn't missed an opportunity to heap praise on Honda's progress over the winter, both on the performance and the reliability front.
Toro Rossos's trouble-free week so far in Barcelona is going a long way towards helping the Faenza squad's preparations and confidence.
"It was important for us to do as many laps as possible and complete the programme," he said.
"We managed to do so and we even managed to squeeze in some extra kilometres, which made it a very productive day.
"The guys in the garage should be happy with the job they’ve done, we need to continue this high level of work to get as much mileage as possible and gain confidence together.
"Now it’s important to go on working hard, without getting caught up with where we finished on the timesheets - even if it’s quite pleasant to end up where we did."
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