A mixed bag for Toro Rosso on Friday practice for the Russian GP

Carlos Sainz (STR11-02, Car 55)

First Practice Session
Best lap: 1:40.654, pos 10th, 21 laps
Second Practice Session
Best lap: 1:39.465, pos. 11th, 37 laps

“It feels good to be back here in Russia. As I said before arriving here, this is a track that I enjoy and today we were able to cover all of our run plan with no issues, so I’m happy with that. I’m pleased with the car so far and I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend. As we’ve seen during the first three races, the midfield is extremely tight so we need to keep working because it’s not going to be easy.”

Max Verstappen (STR11-01, Car 33)

First Practice Session
Best lap: 1:41.134, pos. 15th, 22 laps
Second Practice Session
Best lap: 1:39.501, pos. 12th, 30 laps

“Quite a difficult start to the weekend. I experienced a lot of oversteer and we haven’t found the right solution for this yet. It felt very tricky out there today – it’s difficult to enter the corner in the right way because when you try to go a bit faster you easily end up off track. Fortunately though, it’s only Friday, so we still have some time to work on this – it will be a long night but I’m confident we will be ready for tomorrow.”

Phil Charles (Chief Race Engineer)

“It was a bit of a mixed bag for us today. The track was quite low grip and we found the last sector in particular quite hard to master for a lot of the running. Overall Carlos was a bit happier: he hit on a balance he was quite happy with in the long-run on soft tyres, but we didn’t really get a clean lap in with him on the shorter runs. For Max it was a bit of a different story; we clearly have a bit of work to do tonight because we didn’t really hit a sweet spot with him today, so we will put the hard work in tonight to get him happy and back to where he normally is.”

Scuderia Toro Rosso