Friday: Toro Rosso fails to exploit its new parts
The two Toro Rosso drivers were expecting a lot from the new parts brought by their team: they were disappointed. The small Scuderia is unable to make the most of its development and is forced to backtrack, dropping in the hierarchy this Friday.
Jean-Eric Vergne – 14th and 16th
In the morning, we tried the car with the new parts the team brought this weekend. We had some doubts about their performance, so in the afternoon, we reverted to some of our old parts to do a test. In terms of performance, we are definitely too slow today, so I anticipate that we will have to make major changes to the car for tomorrow. I was overheating the rear tires, which gave me a lot of understeer on the long stints, and I was far from feeling comfortable today. A lot of work will be needed to make us more competitive for the rest of the weekend. The tires are definitely very important in these conditions, and we need to figure out how to get the best out of them, as I wasn’t very happy with their performance on both the long and short stints.
Daniel Ricciardo – 17th and 17th
« We were optimistic at the beginning of the morning since we had some new developments on the car. However, we were unable to get the best out of them on track. We hope they will make the car faster, but it seems that we will need to take a little more time to study them to get the best result on track. We need to do more work on our settings, but we have been in this situation before, so I expect that after a long debrief and work tonight, we will be able to make progress in time for tomorrow. On the front tires, we saw the usual difference between the option and prime tires, and in terms of development brought by Pirelli, they seem to work well, which is good. »
