Toro Rosso praises Vergne for great qualifying
Toro Rosso's Jean-Eric Vergne qualified 8th and proved to be very happy with that result. Team mate Daniil Kvyat was disappointed with a lap that puts him 15th on tomorrow's grid.
Jean-Eric Vergne, STR9-04, 8th: “Today we have done great in qualifying. The field is tight so you really have to drive the perfect lap, getting the best out of the car. The team and I managed to achieve our goals and this is the result that rewards all the hard work that we have put in. To start from 8th position on the grid is very promising and I will certainly do my best to finish the race and bring home some good points.”
Daniil Kvyat, STR9-03, 15th: “I’m disappointed with how my Qualifying turned out today. After the limited running yesterday, the team worked hard overnight and everything seemed to be working fine in this morning’s FP3 session. Then during Qualifying I found the car difficult to drive and I experienced some brake problems. We will have to analyse this closely tonight, but I’m sure we will be fine for tomorrow. It is not ideal to start from P15, but as always, I will give it my 100 percent and aim to finish the race as high as possible.”
Phil Charles, Chief Race Engineer: “After having had a challenging day yesterday, we managed to have a productive FP3 session this morning. JEV did a brilliant job in Qualifying, producing an excellent Q3 lap to secure P8 for tomorrow’s race. He looked strong all throughout the weekend, so it’s great to see him confirm his performance with a strong Qualifying result. Daniil on the other hand was a bit unlucky today. The fact that he was not able to get much running done yesterday, probably hurt him a little bit today even though he did well in FP3. He has shown good potential, so I’m confident that both our drivers will have a strong race tomorrow.”
Ricardo Penteado, Renault Sport F1 track support leader: “Today was a good day, with the clean data from FP3 helping us to optimize Qualifying. We used the Power Unit to the maximum and JEV did a great job to get into the top ten. It was a shame we could not have given Daniil some more mileage yesterday as it could have helped him out today, but that is not to take away from a strong STR-Renault team performance.”
