Toro Rosso
Max Verstappen: “It’s my first time driving here, so in FP1 this morning I had to learn the track and we took it easy. I improved quite a lot and I’m happy with today’s progress. I didn’t touch the wall, managed to stay out of trouble and was able to get a lot of track time, which is always important. This morning we were also validating all the new updates on the car and it was a good first session. FP2 also started well and the performance was good, especially on the Soft tyre. We still need to work a bit on the car balance regarding the Supersoft, so we will make sure we do it tonight. I have to say that physically, this is the toughest track so far this year, but I’m coping well as we trained very hard before getting here.”
Carlos Sainz: “FP1 was a good session for us. We managed to complete our programme and learn the circuit, which was my main objective here today. FP2 wasn’t that straight-forward unfortunately – I kissed the wall at Turn 5 and I suddenly had a puncture which ended up damaging the floor a bit… So we needed to change it and lost some track time, which made it quite a difficult session, but it’s better that it happened today and not tomorrow or Sunday! It felt very warm out there, you really sweat a lot, but we’ve trained very well for this race and I’m happy to confirm that all that hard work is now paying off.”
Phil Charles (Chief Race Engineer): “Singapore is a very tricky track – don’t forget there’s 23 corners in a lap, and it’s very much about being precise, neat and tidy. It’s a circuit that definitely takes a bit of learning and settling in to get it right. This is especially tricky for rookie drivers – and we have two! That being said they both did a very good job in FP1, building their confidence nicely. FP2 however was a much scrappier session for a number of reasons: Carlos had a bit of damage on his car, which unfortunately cost him a lot of running, so he wasn’t in a perfect flow to get a good Option lap in. Max’s short run wasn’t perfect either, and we think we can work on that a bit more with getting tyres ready. Regarding the long runs, I think we need to analyse this carefully tonight. Understanding the tyre temperatures here will also be important in particular on the Prime for us. It’s probably fair to say that today we haven’t really hit the bullseye with the tyres as often as we would like.”
