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Toro Rosso plans to run different spec cars in Singapore

Toro Rosso plans to run different specifications of car throughout the rest of the Singapore Grand Prix weekend to understand its aerodynamic upgrades better.

The team was analysing a new aerodynamic packaged during Friday practice in Singapore, with both cars performing strongly throughout the two sessions. While both Sainz and Daniil Kvyat were in the top ten throughout the day, Sainz says the one downside was the running did not show a clear difference between the updated car and the previous specification.

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"Probably this is the only bad news," Sainz said. "Both packages are working very similar so they intend to keep both packages different for the whole weekend and see if they can spot something more during the weekend, which is not ideal because it means the package hasn’t brought much or as much as we thought.

"So there’s not been a lot of development this year but thank God not many things have developed a lot because of next year’s regulations."

While there are new aerodynamic regulations being introduced in 2017, Sainz says he is not concerned by the lack of performance from this weekend's upgrade.

"I don’t like being negative or anything like that, but this obviously is the best sign, up until this package everything the team has put on the car has worked, and all the numbers the team has brought to the track have been spot on.

"This is the first one that maybe doesn’t accomplish our expectations, so it’s not ideal but not a disaster because it has worked 90% of the other cases, but it’s not a big concern let’s put it like that."

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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.