F1 News, Reports and Race Results

Toro Rosso's Sainz on the up, but Kvyat left frustrated

Toro Rosso's Carlos Sainz bounced back after a problematic practice day to qualify in tenth place for Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix.

Sainz lost time yesterday after running off the track and damaging his car in FP2. He also had an engine cut-off at the start of FP3 on Saturday morning. However when it came to qualifying, the Spaniard was all smiles.

"A good qualifying," he said. "We found a really good set-up in FP3 that made me feel really confident with the car.

"We put in very competitive lap times. P10 is a good place to start in tomorrow's race," he added.

"After a tricky start to the weekend I'm happy with today's result. I look forward to tomorrow's race: we have a good chance of scoring point."

Unfortunately his team mate Daniil Kvyat ended up with more than his fair share of ill fortune on Saturday.

"How frustrating," said the Russian. "In this afternoon's qualifying we lost all the balance.

"All the confidence I had in the car up until now was gone. It just felt the worst it's been all weekend.

"I felt I had no grip anymore and my rear was sliding a lot, it's really disappointing," he added.

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"Let's see what we can do tomorrow. The good thing is that anything can happen on race day. We now need to evaluate all the options, look into the data and understand what's best for us."

"It's a shame," said Toro Rosso technical director James Key. "We did some good work overnight to pick-up a little more performance for today. "That seemed to be working reasonably well this morning.

"The spacing between teams around us was again very tight, so we knew qualifying could be a bit of a lottery," he admitted. "We knew we had a chance of Q3, although it was tight, but Carlos made it happen as we hoped, so very pleased with that.

"For Daniil, he's been happy with his car this weekend. But this afternoon he felt a little bit of instability in some of the slow-speed corners, which he didn't have this morning.

"Maybe this is something to do with a bit of wind or track temperature difference that we had in qualifying compared to the other practice session.

"However, he was less comfortable and unfortunately didn't quite get a lap together - that we knew he was capable of - to get through to Q3.

"He starts P14, but we know he's got the raw pace to do the job here and I'm sure we can progress from there tomorrow."

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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.