Categories: FeatureFeatures

Team Talk - Saturday in Shanghai

Toro Rosso

Carlos Sainz - 8th place
“I’m happy with my qualifying today as I’d say we couldn’t have got much more out of the car. It’s true that I lost a bit of time in the last sector, but to start from P8 tomorrow is not a bad result and we will try and go forward in the race. All in all, I’m also satisfied to have finally put a good qualifying session together from start to end this year, as during the previous two in Australia and Bahrain it’s something that I hadn’t been able to do yet. I think that tomorrow’s race is going to be very interesting strategy wise and I hope to fight for good points.”

Max Verstappen - 9th place
“I think we’ve qualified in quite a good position for tomorrow, and to get into Q3 is always good. Of course, you always hope for more, but today it didn’t really all come together unfortunately. The conditions out there were quite tricky: the car felt a bit different compared to yesterday and the track was a bit more slippery. However, we are in the top 10 and I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s race.”

James Key, technical director
“A very eventful day. Today’s qualifying was an exciting session, with a lot going on. I think we come away happy to have both cars through to top ten relatively easily but a little bit frustrated that we didn’t really pull it together with the final runs in Q3. Both cars lost quite a bit of time in the third sector during their final run, which means that we are 8th and 9th when I think we could’ve been a little bit higher than that. We clearly need to look into this and understand what happened, but it’s history now and our immediate priority is to move on and concentrate on preparation for the race. There are several strategies that need to be considered given the combination of tyres available so there may be some different approaches tomorrow. It’s also a bit difficult to predict because conditions look like they will be pretty warm so we will need to consider how this may affect the tyres and what implications there are for our plans”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.