Not a bad day for Toro Rosso on Friday practice for the Singapore GP

Daniil Kvyat (FP1: Best lap: 1:50.990, pos. 9th, 26 laps / FP2: Best lap: 1:48.770, pos. 10th, 31 laps): “It was a good session, not a bad performance at the end of today’s sessions but we obviously always aim for a higher position. Generally we are quite good on Friday evening in analysing all the data and improve the car for Saturday so we will certainly do our homework in the best possible way and be back tomorrow in a pretty good shape, with a faster car”.

 Jean-Eric Vergne (FP1: Best lap: 1:50.539, pos. 6th, 11 laps / FP2: Best lap: 1:48.800, pos. 11th, 33 laps): "I’m quite happy today, even though we had a problem in FP1 which did not allow me to run that much. But the feeling was good and I’m confident that we have a competitive car this weekend. The lap time is not really representative as, apart from losing time on track, I didn’t complete a perfect lap but the long run pace looks pretty good. We will now do our usual work in trying to improve our already not too bad performance for tomorrow and Sunday’s race”.

Phil Charles (Chief Race Engineer): “Not a bad day for us. Even though Daniil has raced here once in previous categories, this remains a hard track to learn and he’s done pretty well getting up to speed quickly. Jev has had a bit of a difficult start as we had some problems on his car in FP1. Despite this, overall we got through most of our programme with both cars. We are a little bit disappointed with our short run pace so we’ve got a little bit of work to do there with both drivers. As for the long runs, Jev’s pace is quite good, while Daniil still has something to do to improve it further. I expect he will do his homework tonight like he normally does and we can make the next step. Hopefully it will be better tomorrow”.

Ricardo Penteado (Renault Sport F1 track support leader): “We pushed both power units to a total very high mileage and made some good progress over the day. We found a good set-up fairly early on, particularly with regards to the temperature, and will focus on this for the rest of the weekend to keep a good range for the race. Unfortunately JEV had a battery problem in FP1, which we need to investigate, but we didn’t see a reoccurrence of this in FP2 and could work through the programme as planned”.

Scuderia Toro Rosso