Toro Rosso
Max Verstappen: “I’m happy with qualifying in ninth position today, especially after having a few problems in this morning’s practice session where, like yesterday, I was struggling a bit with the high track temperatures. We were able to stay calm and it was a good qualifying lap. I think today’s result is the maximum we could do and I enjoyed it out there this afternoon! Our objective for tomorrow is clearly to score some points and I will try my best to make that happen.”
Carlos Sainz: “I had been quite comfortable with the car the whole weekend, we were looking strong. However, in today’s qualifying session the conditions changed, as well as the feeling with the car, especially with the brakes, compared to yesterday. All this made me lose my references and I just couldn’t get into a rhythm, so unfortunately I struggled to put a qualifying lap together. We really didn’t expect to find ourselves in this position as we knew we had the potential to make it into the top ten. We need to analyse this and focus on tomorrow’s race. It’s not the easiest of tracks to overtake, but we said the same about Monaco and I was able to finish in the points after having started from the pit-lane, so anything is possible tomorrow and we will fight as hard as possible for more points.”
Ben Waterhouse (Deputy Technical Director): “Our target coming here this weekend was clearly to get points on Sunday and in order to achieve this we wanted to get both cars into Q3 today. Ultimately we didn’t manage to accomplish that, but with a P9 and a P12 we’ve still got a good chance of finishing in the top ten tomorrow. Max did a great job in qualifying today. A P9 is a very good result for him after a difficult day yesterday. A P12 for Carlos is a bit unfortunate because he has been strong all weekend and he only missed out on getting into Q3 by a small margin, with just one tenth covering four cars. Unfortunately he just didn’t feel comfortable with the brakes today and a scrappy third practice session just didn’t set him up well for qualifying. We will have a good look at the data tonight in order to have a strong race tomorrow and make sure we have the best chance to finish with both cars in the points.”
