Toro Rosso wary of tyre degradation
Toro Rosso once gain split Friday duties between its two race driver and Daniel Ricciardo. Despite early work, both race drivers agree there is still a lot of set-up work to do. They key factor in these adjustments will be to keep tyre degradation within acceptable limits.
Daniel Ricciardo, STR6-02:
First Practice Session: Best lap 1.40.748, pos. 12th, 23 laps
“There’s a bit less pressure here than in Melbourne, where I was kept very busy at my home event. I felt more comfortable in the cockpit today and got stuck into the programme. It was a productive session for me, on a similar programme to Australia, going out with a baseline set-up to build on. I was able to provide some feedback which will hopefully be useful to the team, covering areas like where on the track the KERS might be used and what the car needs, as well as basics like helping out with gear ratios. It was good for my learning curve too. The first half hour the track was a bit dusty, but of course it will get better over the rest of the weekend. I last drove here in 2006 in Formula BMW, which is quite a long time ago. I remembered most of it, except that this time, everything seemed to happen 30 seconds quicker!”
Jaime Alguersuari, STR6-03:
First Practice Session: Best lap 1.40.770, pos. 13th, 24 laps
Second Practice Session: Best lap 1.38.846, pos. 10th, 31 laps
“A good number of laps and a reasonable lap time in FP2 after we managed to make big improvements from the morning session. We need to keep all our focus on the race, because that is going to be the priority, unless the weather produces something strange. Tyre degradation will be the key factor here in Sepang, as we expected, so we must concentrate on our performance over a long run, improving our autonomy on the rear tyres. In general I am happy with the improvement we saw during the day, but I am still not one hundred percent satisfied as I believe there is room for improvement from my side and also from the car. The heat? You get used to it and as long as you keep drinking a lot and stay hydrated it actually gets better during the weekend.”
Sebastien Buemi, STR6-02:
Second Practice Session: Best lap 1.40.115, pos. 18th, 31 laps
“I only had the one session today and it did not go that well, although we did acquire a lot of data on long and short runs. Now, we must look carefully at the figures, because on track, I did not manage to put everything together perfectly: I had a yellow flag, when I was on what would have been my fastest lap on new soft tyres, so in terms of outright lap time it is a long way off what we can do, not reflecting our real pace. We expected tyre degradation here and in fact we have seen a very different situation to what we had in Melbourne. However, we have to be quite cautious about drawing conclusions too quickly. It might change the order a bit, but honestly I don’t expect big changes. We can improve for tomorrow. As always, it’s very hot here, but nothing we don’t know how to deal with.”
