Toro Rosso lack speed to get points in Bahrain
Toro Rosso failed to score points at the Bahrain Grand Prix, a first this season. Daniil Kvyat came close but finished in 11th place. Jean-Eric Vergne's race was compromised early on by a collision and abandoned the race early on.
Daniil Kvyat, STR9-03, 11th: “Unfortunately today didn’t go as I would have liked. I was not happy with our pace and it was frustrating to see the other cars just passing me by. The start was a little bit messy and I lost a position. From then on I tried to push as much as possible, but it wasn’t enough to get into the points today. We will now have to analyze carefully what went wrong today and hopefully we will come back stronger at the next race in China.”
Jean-Eric Vergne, STR9-04, DNF: “It was a bit of a mess at the start in turn 8 with a lot of cars around me, but while the others were having a poor exit I had a clean one on the outside. When I then found myself next to a Lotus, I got squeezed more and more and when he realized I was about to overtake him anyway, he just closed the door. That is why our wheels touched and my car took off, out of control. Both rear wing and floor got heavily damaged with a huge loss of aero performance and it was just not possible to continue my race. Hopefully bad luck will leave us alone for the next races.”
Franz Tost, Team Principal: "Considering our speed during all the weekend's practice sessions, I was expecting a much better result for the race today. Unfortunately Jean-Eric was hit right at the beginning: when we read all the data and realized how much downforce he had actually lost because of the damaged floor and wing, we decided to call him in. As for Daniil, he did a good race but we didn't have enough speed today and we will have to investigate the reason for this in order to have a better weekend in China.”
Ricardo Penteado, Renault Sport F1 track support leader: “Daniil again did a great job to bring the car home in P11. He did very well with the energy management and being on the limit of both fuel and state of charge in the battery. During the safety car in particular he did well to save some fuel so we could really push straight after. JEV had a tougher race after the contact early on. Eventually the team decided to retire as there was just too much performance loss from the car as a result. We just missed the points this race but there is not much between us and the top ten so we’ll see what we can do in China.”
