Exhaust failure put Sainz out of FP2 in Bahrain

40

It's hot enough in Bahrain as it is, but Carlos Sainz got an extra dose of heat from his Toro Rosso on Friday.

The STR12 suffered an exhaust failure early in the second free practice session. Sainz was forced to pull over and jump out of the smoking car, triggering a virtual safety car.

"Quite a frustrating start to the weekend here in Bahrain for me," sighed Sainz. "Today’s FP2 was very important. To only be able to do a couple of laps is quite unfortunate.

"This is a bit of a setback for the weekend. We will try and analyse and pick-up as much information as possible from the others, cover this lack of data that we have right now, and try to recover it tomorrow."

"FP3 isn’t a very representative session either. It means we will go blind into qualifying and the race, but this is the situation right now. I’m confident that we can end up doing a good job."

Vettel survives shutdown scare to stay fastest in FP2

"Unfortunately for Carlos, we suffered an exhaust failure during his first run of the session," confirmed Jody Egginton, Toro Rosso's head of vehicle performance.

"It ended his running due to the time required to replace the effected parts."

While Sainz completed only five laps in FP2, his team mate Daniil Kvyat was able to run 35 laps during the 90-minute session.

"We have collected important long run data in the evening session which both drivers will benefit from," Egginton acknowledged.

"There is still work to do to get the car optimised, especially for short runs. But we have a good idea of what is required to extract the performance from the car.

"We will be working hard overnight analysing the data to allow us to make a step forwards in tomorrow's sessions and ultimately the race.

GALLERY: All the pictures from Friday in Bahrain

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

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.