Toro Rosso
Carlos Sainz
“Not the best of qualifying sessions for me, but not the worst either. We knew it wasn’t going to be an easy one and that we were going to struggle a bit at this track. Q3 was just too difficult to get into today. My start to the session was okay and I put in a good lap time in Q1, but from that point onwards we didn’t really improve anymore and we were out in Q2. We will now have to analyse this, see why we couldn’t find any lap time there, and get ready for tomorrow. I think it will be an interesting race – in dry conditions it will be tricky for us to fight for points but if it rains anything can happen and I also enjoy it in the wet… I will definitely do a rain dance before going to bed tonight!”
Daniil Kvyat
“A decent qualifying. I don’t think there was any more we could extract from the car and a P14 is the most we could achieve today. My Q2 lap was quite clean in these tricky conditions – there was a lot of wind and it was hard to find a good balance of the car – and I’m pleased with my job today. I have to say that the track conditions changed a lot from yesterday to today and we therefore had to adapt ourselves and carry on learning during the session, which wasn’t easy. Having said that, it’s always an enjoyable track to drive and every single corner is different to the next one – it’s definitely a circuit with a lot of character! Hopefully tomorrow there will be some rain so that we can have a good race!”
Jody Egginton, Head of Vehicle Performance
“As expected, the weather has started to have an effect on the running here in Brazil. In both sessions today we have had to be ready to adapt the run programmes and, of course, we can expect this trend to continue for the race tomorrow. Regarding today’s sessions, we managed to complete pretty much all of the FP3 programme for both drivers, setting new baselines in the cooler track and ambient conditions. Changes to tyre preparation and management were required and we tested a few items related to this, which provided some useful data for qualifying. Q1 passed without incident for us but we knew we had to try and find something extra to overcome our known limitations. This is why the second runs in Q1 were used to investigate a different approach, which unfortunately did not yield a benefit. With the midfield quite tight, Q2 was clearly going to offer a challenge and unfortunately we came up short on this occasion and were not able to progress to Q3. However, the set-ups the engineers and drivers have been working on together since FP1 have provided a good general balance in long and short runs so, although we are disappointed with the qualifying result, it’s just a case of ensuring we optimise the set-ups for the race conditions. As we know from the weather forecasts, tomorrow’s race could present some opportunities, so we are looking forward to it.”
