Team Talk - Saturday in Belgium

Toro Rosso

Carlos Sainz
“It’s being a very tough weekend for us, maybe even a bit more than expected, and it’s disappointing not to be able to fight to get into Q3. On one side I’m happy because I know I’ve extracted the maximum out of the car today, but on the other side I’m sad to see us sitting in P15, a second off Q3. It’s not good enough. There’s a lot of analysis going on right now inside the team to see where we are losing so much performance – we know the reason for half of it, it’s due to the 2015 power unit, but we need to understand why we are not performing as expected in Sector 2. We’ve been slow all weekend so tomorrow’s race will be difficult. I’m confident that a right strategy will get us close to the top ten, but it won’t be easy to finish in the points. Having said that, we will give it our all and fight hard to finish as high up as possible.”

Daniil Kvyat
“Even if we are not where we would like to be, I think it wasn’t a bad qualifying session for me and I’m happy with my laps and my progress from Friday to today. My lap was pretty much the maximum of what I could’ve done today. We must accept that the car is where it is right now and, of course, it’s difficult for us but we just have to work with what we’ve got and try to move forward. I think that for the rest of the season this is what it’s going to be like and we will have to keep fighting, there’s no other choice. Tomorrow we will do our race and see where we end up – I don’t want to do any predictions, all I know is that it will be tricky but we will do our best with a package that isn’t competitive at this track.”

Phil Charles, chief race engineer
“We had the feeling qualifying would be a difficult session for us, we’ve been struggling a bit this weekend. Something’s not working very well for us right now and we need to look into that further in a lot of detail. We know that straight-line performance is important here and this is becoming quite a big weakness for us now – we knew this would happen, but nonetheless there’s more to it than that I think. We need to understand the situation a bit better going into the next races, we introduced a lot of new parts on the car throughout July and, although we have not seen any obvious problems with any of them, we have had two unexpectedly difficult races on a row now. Sadly, Daniil didn’t get through to Q2 as he lost a bit of time in the last corner – it’s a shame, as he was actually up on his teammate at that point, so that was a bit unfortunate… But that’s life and we have to move on. Regarding Carlos, his Q2 lap wasn’t so easy, as he got disrupted by another car a little bit and didn’t quite get the Sector 2 together… So, all in all, it was a tough session for the team and the drivers. The thing to do now is understand why we seem to be struggling a bit at the moment, find out if it’s something on the car, the high track temperatures we’ve had recently or something else, because clearly we are feeling a bit out of position at the moment and we need to come back from that. Shorter term, we need to focus on tomorrow’s race and see what we can do. We think there’s still opportunities here and even if we knew that Spa and Monza wouldn’t be strong events for us, we still have to do our best and that’s what we will do tomorrow.”