Ricciardo happy despite narrowly missing Q3
Toro Rosso was better than on Friday, the neither of its drivers managed to progress through to the top 10 in qualifying, even though Daniel Ricciardo came pretty close.
Daniel Ricciardo, STR8-01, 11th: “Overall, I am pretty happy with eleventh, which is clearly very close to making the cut to Q3. However in Q1 I was frustrated with the balance of the car and I felt I was quite lucky to get into Q2. I believe the wind conditions were making life tricky for everyone and I don’t think I was the only one struggling. I was pretty happy with my Q2 lap even though the car was moving around a lot. Now I’m looking forward to the race: I’m just outside the top ten, I’m on the clean side of the track and I get a free tyre choice.”
Jean-Eric Vergne, STR8-04, 1:38.696, 16th: “I can’t explain my performance or lack of it this afternoon. We struggled with the car right from the start of the weekend, but we had made progress overnight and improved it in FP3. Then, this afternoon, on my first run in Q1 I was struggling on my first run on the Hard tyre, but as soon as I fitted the Medium, I gained two seconds and all of sudden, I had a driveable car and set a good time and was much happier. But in Q2, when I had opted to go for just a single timed lap on the new Option, I again found the car very difficult to drive. Maybe it is linked to the warm-up of the tyres, as it is very difficult to get them up to temperature, so we will have to look at that, but generally, I just didn’t feel comfortable driving the car. Tomorrow we will see what happens, when hopefully the improvement we made overnight will pay off over the long runs.”
Laurent Mekies, Head of Vehicle Performance: “We had a lot of work to do last night, after lacking pace on Friday and the result was that today, we went in different directions with our two cars. With Daniel, we recovered well to be eleventh, about one tenth off P8 in Q2 and only a tenth behind cars that were ahead of us by a second yesterday. With Jev, it’s been a bit up and down between this morning and qualifying, at times showing a good pace and at others not. Unfortunately, that progress from the morning was not sustained in qualifying. He was quick in Q1 but could not match that performance in Q2. However, with the general progress we made since the first day, we can expect our long run pace to be better tomorrow and we can aspire to having two cars competitive enough to run at the front of the mid-field.”
