Just one Toro Rosso driver on Q3 at Sochi

Max Verstappen (STR11-01, Car 33)

Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:38.123, (Q2) 1:37.510, (Q3) 1:37.583, pos. 9th

“I’m pleased and happy with today’s qualifying result. Especially after a difficult day yesterday, where we were struggling a lot, to come back and get through to Q3 is something I honestly didn’t expect. In addition to that, I’d say this is one of the most difficult qualifying sessions of the season: the track is very slippery and as soon as you brake a meter earlier or later, you immediately lose a lot of lap time and lock-up the tyres… So you really have to be very focused and that’s what I did to end up P9. For sure tomorrow’s race will be another challenge because we are all very close, but I’m ready for it and hopefully we can carry on scoring good points.”

Carlos Sainz (STR11-02, Car 55)

Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:37.784, (Q2) 1:37.652, pos. 11th

“I’m disappointed with not getting into Q3 today, because we’ve been very fast the whole weekend and we had the pace to end up in the top ten. I was putting a good lap together in my last Q2 effort but in the last sector I found some traffic that slowed me down. I will go back to the hotel a bit angry tonight, but the positive thing is that we know that we have the pace and we can perform well tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to the race.”

James Key (Technical Director)

“I think this morning we recovered reasonably well with car balance on both cars compared to yesterday, particularly on Max’s, where we were able to build in some stability with changes overnight. As a result, this morning’s practice was a lot more competitive. We knew that today’s qualifying was going to be very tight, with a big bunch of teams very close together behind Mercedes, Ferrari and Williams. We were confident that reaching Q3 was possible with both cars, but we knew it had to be a very well-executed quali to make sure it worked.

Sadly for Carlos, he didn’t quite get through as Kvyat just got ahead at the end of Q2, which pushed him down to P11. So unfortunately he starts in eleventh position, but at least has the advantage of new tyres. Max did a good job to get through to Q3, even though we underperformed in the final part of the session and we now need to understand what happened. I think tomorrow is going to be very interesting.

This is a tricky track. Tyres are performing to a certain extent as expected, but it’s going to be tight on strategy and tyre management. We know you can overtake here, even though it’s difficult, so it’s going to be interesting to see exactly how the race works out. Our race pace will be better than our quali pace, which is typically the case, so now we need to look at the positions we are in and how we can progress: that’s our plan for tonight.”

Scuderia Toro Rosso