Toro Rosso
Max Verstappen: “I’m satisfied with today’s P8. The most important is that we are in front of our main competitors, Lotus and Force India. I have to say that I’m really happy with my lap, especially after FP3, where we were struggling a bit with the tyres, but we managed to turn it around very quickly and have a very good qualifying session. We really maximised today’s result. Now I’m really looking forward to the race tomorrow, there will definitely be some good fights!”
Carlos Sainz: “A disappointing way to end what was being a good qualifying session. We knew we had a car good enough to get into Q3 – my lap was actually three or four tenths quicker than the limit to get into the top ten… It’s a shame that I didn’t know that when I was in the car. I thought it was going to be very tight so I was pushing to the limit and unfortunately made a mistake, touching the wall. It’s something to learn from and now we just need to look forward to tomorrow, that’s when the points are given.”
Ben Waterhouse (Deputy Technical Director): “We haven’t had the smoothest of weekends and we’ve been struggling a bit at times, but after a lot of work and effort by the team we managed to get the car into a really good position and we showed good performance today. Max’s P8 is an excellent result, I think it’s about everything we could’ve expected from him. On the other hand, it’s disappointing to see Carlos starting from P14 because he showed he had the pace and he was on for a Q3 lap, but unfortunately he hit the wall. We’ve shown that we’ve got good pace, so we can certainly look forward to tomorrow. I think Max is on line for hopefully a very good result and for Carlos it will be difficult, as it’s always a bit of a challenge here, but the target is to get him back into the points positions.”
