Toro Rosso
Carlos Sainz: “It’s a bit of a frustrating weekend because of the grid-penalties for tomorrow’s race, but at least today we were able to extract the maximum out of the car. Actually the car is feeling great! It’s just a shame that we have so many grid-position penalties and not enough power. It’s going to be a very interesting race tomorrow and I expect a fun fight at the start, as the last six cars on the grid are myself and Max, both Red Bull cars and two world champions like Button and Alonso. I hope we can still end up fighting for some points even if it’s not going to be easy, but that’s our target.”
Max Verstappen: “I expected it to be a difficult qualifying session today, as we had to change the engine in between sessions. The team worked very hard and did a great job in doing it in time. To be honest, it was a surprise that we were even able to drive out before the end of Q1… and they did it! I’d like to say thank you for the big effort. Ok, we all saw that some bodywork came off the car when I was out on track, but you have to understand that they always try their best, they wanted me to get out there and these things sometimes happen when you are on the limit, fighting against time. Tomorrow’s race needs a lot of overtaking again, so I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun. Our race pace doesn’t look that bad compared to Red Bull, and we will also fight with the McLaren’s at the start. Hopefully we can also challenge Sauber, and then see what else we are capable of doing...Let’s see!”
James Key, Technical Director: “We always knew that today was going to be a bit of a compromise for us with the engine penalties for both drivers. Therefore, what we decided to do for FP3 was concentrate on the race and not so much on qualifying performance, so we hadn’t actually done any form of low-fuel running at all until a few laps in qualy. We learned a little bit more about the car this morning and both drivers are happy with the car in high-fuel loads. For qualifying it was clear that in reality we were fighting for the last places on the grid because of the number of penalties that we are taking together with a few other teams, so there was little point in using tyre sets to try and make progress. It was a case of giving Carlos a chance to be as high as possible, as his number of penalties are similar to others. Unfortunately for Max, we had to fit a new engine between FP3 and qualifying. The mechanics did an absolutely outstanding job to get that done in such a short time, because we felt it was extremely unlikely we’d make the session at all, we wanted to try and get a short run or installation lap in for Max to ensure all was ok with the car. Sadly, there seems to have been a bit of an issue with the bodywork, we are investigating to understand how this happened. We will have to see how the penalties for tomorrow’s race pan out now. Clearly we will have a lot of work to do but we are actually looking forward to the race, trying to work our way through the traffic and see what we can do. Both our drivers are super motivated and the team is as well, and our high-fuel pace looked quite reasonable, so it’s a case of taking on the challenge and doing as much as we can!”
