Saturday: Toro Rosso drinks the chalice to the dregs in qualifying
After having a rough start to the weekend, the Toro Rosso team believes they have made progress but not enough to compete with their usual rivals. Once again, Jean-Eric Vergne was unable to go beyond Q1, while Daniel Ricciardo opted to save tires and will start behind Heikki Kovalainen's Caterham.
Daniel Ricciardo – 17th and 17th:
« It was a rather difficult afternoon. After being off pace yesterday, we made quite significant changes to the car since yesterday. We managed to reduce the gap a bit, but not enough to be able to compete with our usual rivals. So we decided not to do a second stint in Q2 in order to preserve fresh tires for tomorrow.
We have gathered some positive information from the work we have done since yesterday, and we must continue in this direction to try to find more speed.
Regarding the fact that Kovalainen is ahead of me in Q2, given my position, it’s not that important and, in fact, it places us on the clean side of the track, which might even be better.
Jean-Eric Vergne – 16th and 18th:
« Until now, it has been a difficult weekend during which we have suffered from a general lack of performance. I have struggled to achieve a good lap, particularly because I couldn’t get a good feel with the brakes, which means that sometimes I locked all four wheels. All of this affected my qualifying, and I simply didn’t have the speed to move on to Q2.
For the moment, things are not happening the way I want them to, but I will just keep working and I won’t let myself get discouraged.
Sometimes our race pace is better than in qualifying, but I’m not sure that will be the case tomorrow.
