Toro Rosso upbeat after strong Friday
Both Toro Rosso drivers and the team in its entirety were happy to see a troublefree day of Friday running at Suzuka. New components were succesfully tested on both cars while the long runs that were done bode well for the remainder of the weekend.
Jaime Alguersuari, 11th:
"This was a good day's work and I feel we have made a step forward, which I hope we can confirm tomorrow with a good qualifying performance which would give us the sort of grid position from which to have a strong race. Our car definitely feels better at this type of track than the high downforce type like our last race in Singapore. We have found more pace and there is still more to come, so it looks quite promising at the moment. There is quite a big difference between the two compounds and anyway, this track is demanding on tyres. This means that finding the best strategy to run will be fairly tricky and it should produce a fun race."
Sebastien Buemi, 10th:
"I think this is the first very nice, very smooth Friday we have had for a long time, maybe since Hungary, with no issues, no crashes, no rain. This meant we were able to get plenty done and have a good feeling for what the car could do and how the few new parts we brought here are working. It's a bit early to talk about car performance, but if you compare today to Singapore, where we were at the back of our group, today we seem to be ahead of all of them with the exception of Petrov. The car is better suited to this type of track, but we still need to wait and see how qualifying goes tomorrow, as it will be a tight fight. However, I am confident we can have a good weekend. We also got a good read of the tyres: both of us got a good long run, Jaime on Option and me on the Prime, doing a lot of laps on the Medium tyres."
Laurent Mekies, Chief Engineer:
"We had a few new things to evaluate this morning - a front wing, a floor and a rear wing configuration - which we did across both cars, while this afternoon was about the traditional Friday work of tyre evaluation, which we completed with no issues. This means we have a fair amount of data to work through tonight. I think we will have a very exciting race, from what we have seen from the race stints done today by the majority of drivers as it seems that tyre behaviour here will mean there will be a variety of strategy choices. Hopefully, we have picked up some pace thanks to the all the efforts that went into introducing our updates. For the moment, they appear to have helped us close the gap to some of our closest rivals and now it is up to us to put everything together tonight in order to confirm that tomorrow."
