Vergne feels he is making good progress

Even though he finished three-tenths behind his teammate during qualifying in Monza, Jean-Eric Vergne expressed satisfaction with his performance, as he believes he has made progress.

I would say that overall, it was quite a good qualifying. Compared to others, it’s always difficult, there’s always the same step. Then, I think that personally, compared to my teammate, I’ve improved quite a bit, just in driving, I’ve gotten much closer to him. Qualifying has always been an exercise that I’ve loved, in all the previous categories as well, where I always felt good. After all, being in F1, a very different car, different tires, it may make things a bit more difficult, I just need time to adapt, to understand things, to work, Vergne confided during a press briefing.

The Toro Rosso driver also admitted that the gap with his teammate was due to an error: « Unfortunately, in my qualifying lap in Q2, I made a small mistake which made me lose more than two-tenths, so I’m just a tenth behind my teammate, so it’s a shame, but well, I know the performance was roughly there, so that’s the positive point of the qualif. In Ascari, when you go full throttle, you take the gears and I hit a bump, it increased my engine revs, and there was the beep to change gears which came, and so I changed the gear, but actually the beep was wrong, I was 500 or 600 revs less, so in 6th [it wasn’t moving forward]. »

The Toro Rosso driver thinks he can do better in the race because the STR7 is generally more competitive in the race than in qualifying: « We’ll try to have a good race once again, consistently, we hope for good performances and then we’ll try to be opportunistic depending on what happens in the race and the strategy adopted. It’s no secret, we’re always a bit better in the race than in qualifying, qualifying was quite tight so we can expect to be on par with the performance of other teams, so we’ll see how it goes. I think tomorrow there may be surprises in strategy, some teams may even make just one stop. »

JEV, as he is nicknamed in reference to his initials, also spoke about the development of his single-seater, which is weaker than that of the competition, although this does not prevent progress: « The car has not made progress for two months, I would say that we manage to adjust it more or less well depending on the circuit, so we haven’t had any developments for two months apart from a few small changes that don’t make much difference. We tell ourselves that it has advanced, but I am on a normal path of progress. At Spa, I didn’t do anything exceptional, I was lucky there was a collision. I think I work better with my engineer, with the team, we manage to perform better in qualifying, in the race, I manage to better handle the tires, to better understand them, and it is all of this that allows us to progress. »

From our correspondent in Monza