Toro Rosso
Carlos Sainz: “What a rainy day! In the morning we were able to go out and run on extreme tyres. Even though it was very difficult out there, we managed to complete some laps and confirm the good feeling we had yesterday driving in the rain. Therefore, there are some positives to take from FP3, as we know we are quite competitive in the wet, but tomorrow everything can change… It could be raining again in qualy but dry in the race. It will be a challenge for both myself and the team to have both qualifying and the race on one same day, but I’m sure we will manage it well, and I’m excited and looking forward to it!”
Max Verstappen: “A bit of a strange day today, there’s been a lot of waiting around because of the rain… This morning in FP3 I wasn’t able to have much track time. I went out and did two laps, warming up a bit, but then there was an issue on the engine side – a misfire - so I had to come into the box and of course we lost a lot of track time. Once we went out again it was raining so hard that you couldn’t even go flat out, so it was a shame not to get a good preparation for qualifying. It’s a pity for the fans that came here today to have to postpone this session to tomorrow, but at least we tried to entertain them a bit in the pit-lane, getting our dads in our cars, bowling with Red Bull cans or fishing…! The funniest moment for me was when my dad told me he was jumping in the car, but that then he wasn’t going to get out again! J Hopefully we can give the fans a good day of track action tomorrow – I’m ready for it!”
Ben Waterhouse (Deputy Technical Director): “There’s not much we can say about today. We anticipated that the weather was going to play a part in today’s proceedings, and that turned out to be the case. At least we got some running in this morning, which was useful for both drivers, even though we had a few small issues on both cars. This led to slightly reduced running, but we were able to get it all fixed in time for qualifying. However, this session didn’t take place. The only thing which we benefitted from is that we managed to do a seat fit with two of our “reserve drivers”! J Now we look forward to tomorrow; with both qualifying and the race on the same day, it’s going to be particularly busy. Let’s see what the weather brings in the morning, we have a competitive car and strong drivers, so we hope for a strong qualifying performance and then to achieve good points during the afternoon's race.”
