Ultimately a bad day for Toro Rosso with Jean-Eric Vergne kicked out directly in Q1 and Daniel Ricciardo fighting as hard as he could for pace but not being able to extract more performance out of the car and having to settle for P17.
Here are a few selected quotes from the guys who are hopping for a better day tomorrow during the race, because if we take a look at the timetable the difference with the cars in front is not that big and all can be won back on track tomorrow after the lights will turn green.
Daniel Ricciardo: “P17 is not going to put a smile on my face, as I had expected to do better today. I drove as hard as I could, but that did not produce a good enough lap time. With the package we had, I don’t think I could have got much more out of it. Hopefully tomorrow will be better and then we must look at trying to improve our qualifying performance for the next race. We are not where we want to be, especially as before the weekend, we had expected to be closer to the top ten. At the moment we don’t have the answers to what happened. This weekend, we had a few small updates but we also tried a few drastic measures in a way that required me to drive differently, so either we can make it work in Bahrain or we could go back to something we understand a bit better.”
Jean-Eric Vergne: “I am not feeling good after that. I’m not really sure what happened this afternoon, but we lacked speed. My lap was not exceptional, but nor was it bad, so we have to try and understand why it was so slow. All we can do is try and have a good afternoon tomorrow and then improve the car for the coming races, because what happened this afternoon was simply bizarre. It’s true that I got a good result starting low down the grid in Malaysia, but it would be nice to at least start higher up the order quite soon. I will feel better tomorrow morning and will look forward to seeing what the race might bring.”
Laurent Mekies (Chief Engineer): “Obviously, this was a disappointing qualifying for us and today we clearly lacked the pace we needed to be in the fight. We now have to look at where we lost this performance. We made quite a few changes to the cars from yesterday and during this morning’s free practice and we must assess where we did not go in the right direction. So far this weekend, we explored a quite different direction in terms of set-up and maybe it cost something in terms of ultimate pace in qualifying. However, it was a job that needed to be done and we must work out how to improve it for tomorrow. However, I believe the situation for the race is still very much open for us to get a reasonable result, as the gaps are in fact relatively small.”
Images: Getty Images/Red Bull Content Pool
