Toro Rosso
Carlos Sainz
“It’s been a tough Friday. Our main target has been to try and compensate our lack of top speed here in Spa. We are definitely struggling at this track, as there are so many up-hill and flat-out sections… But what we need to do is to just keep working hard – at the moment we don’t look very good and even though we knew this weekend was going to be a challenge, we expected to be a bit higher up than where we are now.”
Daniil Kvyat
“We were able to complete our programme today and we tried most of the things we wanted, so we have a lot of data to go through for tomorrow. We will now study as much as we can in order to improve, as today wasn’t an easy day at all and there are still some areas where we certainly need to progress. We will try our best to do that!”
Phil Charles, chief race engineer
“Certainly not a good day for us. We knew that coming here the high power and aero efficiency sensitivity requirement of this track would not be favourable for our package. That is reflected in our sector 1 and sector 3 times, which are certainly not strong on the short runs today. However, our sector 2 times, where there is more medium-slow cornering, are not as competitive as we had hoped and do not offset our performance losses in sectors 1 and 2. In more details, regarding sector 2, I don’t think we have put the tyre in a happy window today and the drivers have not felt good levels of grip. We have had very high tyre temperatures in today’s hot conditions. I don’t think we are the only ones struggling in this respect, as there are a few occurrences of blistered tyres elsewhere, but we do seem to be outside of our normal performance ranking. So we will need to work hard tonight to try to work out what is making us particularly tyre-grumpy here. On the positive side, we elected to test the Halo here in FP1 because the circuit gradient changes in Eau Rouge would be of interest for visibility. It was fitted on Carlos’ car only for the installation lap as he did not find a significant compromise on what he could see looking up from the depression.”
