Both Toro Rosso cars out to score points in Spain
Both Toro Rosso drivers were again pleased with how the vast amount of updates performed at Barcelona. In qualifying they ended up in 11th and 12th places, very close to Q3 and both men are therefore looking to grab points on Sunday.
Daniel Ricciardo, STR8-04: “I was pleased with the way the session went overall, particularly Q2 and I think we got the most we could out of the car. While yesterday was a good day for us, this morning was nowhere near as positive, as I had problems with the balance on the car. So we had to play catch-up and this afternoon we managed to get it right. I was happy with my lap in Q2, even though you can’t help feeling a little bit disappointed to miss out on Q3 by such a small margin. But we are close and we can have a good race tomorrow. We have made progress and we are once again looking as competitive as we did in China.”
Jean-Eric Vergne, STR8-03: “We have made a good step forward which means we start the European part of the season with a stronger car, so that anything is possible tomorrow. There are a lot of positives to take from this afternoon, starting with the fact my car’s set-up will be even better suited to race conditions than to qualifying. Twelfth is a good place to start and points should be on the agenda tomorrow. The team has done a fantastic job to bring some updates that have worked well, but we still need to do a bit more to be genuine contenders for Q3, but so far it has been a good weekend and I am feeling very confident for tomorrow.”
James Key, Technical Director: “We brought a lot of new bits here, making significant changes to the car, as part of a plan established a long time ago for this weekend in Barcelona. With such a big change, we didn’t know if everything would work as planned and yesterday we saw that, fundamentally, it seemed to work as we hoped. After a satisfactory Friday, this morning Daniel suffered a bit with the balance on his car. However, Jean-Eric has been comfortable with the car all weekend, doing a very good job. Our qualifying result has highs and lows, because it’s our best overall team result this year and Jean-Eric did very well to be so close to his team-mate, but on the other hand, it’s a shame to be out of Q3 by the blink of an eye. It is satisfying that we have made a good step and we are still learning about the package. In our favour for tomorrow is the fact that, being just outside Q3, we can choose our own tyre strategy for the start and we are ahead of all the other cars in that same situation, while we have also saved a new set of Medium tyres. We don’t know quite what to expect from the tyres in the race, as they both seem to be working well as a race tyre.”
