Sunday: Black day for Toro Rosso drivers
The Toro Rosso drivers experienced a disastrous Sunday despite more than encouraging qualifying sessions. Jaime Alguersuari, involved in a collision with Bruno Senna at the start, didn't see the end of the first lap, while his teammate, Sebastien Buemi, was forced to retire after being hit by Sergio Perez.
Sebastien Buemi – Retirement
« I had a great start, moving from eleventh to sixth place after the first corner, which was fantastic. I was able to follow Alonso and Hamilton’s pace. Then, Perez tried to overtake me and simply crashed into me, which completely destroyed my rear wing, and I had no other option but to bring the car back to the garage and retire.
I really can’t understand what he was trying to do, as I was clearly in front of him: the impact was so strong that he must have forgotten to brake.
Next time, we will be in Monza for our home race and, while our car seems to have improved in terms of performance, we’ll see what we can do there.
Jaime Alguersuari – Withdrawal
« I don’t want to speak ill of the other drivers, because that’s not my style, but I think the situation is clear for everyone. As we approached the hairpin after the start, I was in the middle with Senna on the inside and Fernando on the outside, and Senna completely missed his braking point and hit me, which sent me into the Ferrari.
However, there are many positive things to take away from this weekend, as we clearly had a car capable of scoring points today, which would have been a fitting tribute to the hard work put in by the team.
I’m sorry for the guys because it doesn’t happen every day for us to finish in sixth place. Now I’m looking towards Monza, as I see no reason why we can’t be competitive there and score more points.
Franz Tost, Team Principal
Our two drivers had a very short race before being involved in accidents that were not their fault, a viewpoint shared by the stewards who penalized Senna and Perez for their respective collisions with Jaime and Sebastien.
Of course, it’s very disappointing after showing such strong performance in qualifying, which means we were hoping to score a lot of points today.
However, on the positive side, our two drivers performed very well over the weekend, and all the new developments introduced on the STR6 seem to have delivered a performance boost. Given all the work done in the weeks leading up to the summer break, at the Faenza factory and in the Bicester wind tunnel, I think everyone at Scuderia Toro Rosso deserved a better reward than seeing our two cars retire so early.
