Toro Rosso
Carlos Sainz
“Wow, what a qualifying session, and what a result… I feel so good! If I say the truth, this morning we thought we wouldn’t even make it into Q3 after seeing our pace in FP3 but suddenly in Quali everything turned around. I felt much more comfortable in the car and surely the rain and cooler conditions helped. It was probably the toughest qualifying session of my career – to judge each time what tyre to choose, which line to take, see where it was dry and where it was still wet, to cool the tyres, then heat them… It was very, very tricky! But we were in the right place at the right moment every time, we got through every Quali session and we ended up in a great position for tomorrow! I just hope that in the race we can maintain the good feeling we found today in Quali.”
Daniil Kvyat
“I think we did a very poor job in managing the things when it really counted, especially my track position. We were slow putting the slicks on – the tyres were not ready when I came in to the pits and I had to wait too long. I was then caught-up in traffic and I did my last lap, the one that most counted, behind Button… I always raise my hand when I do a bad job, but I think today it was a bit the other way around. It’s a pity that we don’t start further ahead, but in these circumstances a P12 is the most I could do… I really wanted to be in Q3, so we need to analyse what happened and learn from our mistakes. We will try our best tomorrow to recover and move forward, it can still be a good race!”
James Key, technical director
“Overall today’s is a pleasing result because we’ve had a tricky weekend for reasons that we only began to understand after this morning’s FP3. We were miles off the pace we expected to be, but we covered quite a bit having analysed the situation between FP3 and Qualifying… But then it was wet, so the whole situation reset. It was a very exciting qualifying in that respect, because at one point Carlos was out in Q1, whilst Daniil was fourth; we were going up and down all the time in very tricky conditions. It then dried very quickly, so I think Q1 in the end was okay. Q2 worked pretty well for Carlos – I think he dealt really well with the conditions. It was clearly drying very quickly and he put a good lap in. He was the first of the queue, so there was a risk there because the track was getting quicker and quicker and a lot of the guys behind him were finding lap time, but he did enough to get him into Q3. Unfortunately with Daniil, we need to look at this in a little bit more detail, but he was in some traffic after we released him. His timing was ideal, as he was the last car of the queue to cross the line, but we need to understand weather we needed to manage the traffic slightly differently for him on his first lap. The lap he did in the end didn’t get him through – he’s standing just behind the top ten, but he has the advantage of the tyres. In Q3 I think we took a gamble with our approach and we did three laps in our final run, which is a bit of a different approach. It is difficult to judge what would have happened as Carlos first lap of the final run was good with the second lap slower, but with yellow flags at the end that affected others it is difficult to say where we would have ended up. His lap in the middle of that session was enough to keep him in P6, which is a great job from him. To start tomorrow’s race from sixth after a tricky weekend is great news. Now we just need to try and hold it together for tomorrow and make best use of the opportunity.”
