Qualifying at Red Bull Ring doesn't go to plan for Toro Rosso

Carlos Sainz (STR11-01, Car 55)

Third Practice Session - Best lap: 1:09.008, pos. 18th, 11 laps
Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:07.618, pos. 15th

“Definitely not a good Saturday for me today. We faced an electrical issue in this morning’s FP3 and we decided to change the engine for precautionary reasons ahead of this afternoon’s qualifying. Unfortunately I was only able to do 10 laps before having to stop… For sure we could’ve qualified higher today and I’m disappointed with the result. You certainly never want to qualify so far back, but now we just need to think of a good strategy for tomorrow and push for a strong comeback. I will give it my all to finish in the points!”

Danill Kvyat (STR11-03, Car 26)

Third Practice Session - Best lap: 1:08.786, pos. 16th, 32 laps
Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:08.409, pos. 20th

“Not the qualifying we wanted. It’s a real pity! During Q1 I went on the outside kerb at turn 8 and the right suspension failed. The crash was unavoidable, but fortunately I’m okay. It’s being a tough weekend so far and we have a lot of things to analyse, but I’m sure that, with hard work, we can get on top of things by tomorrow. In the race anything can happen and we will fight hard to achieve the best possible result.”

Phil Charles (Chief Race Engineer): "Today definitely did not go to plan for us. I don’t think any of us like to have to perform reliability investigations at the track. Unfortunately we have had to do that for both cars today after qualifying. These investigations often take quite some time to form conclusions. So I am usually careful to try not to conclude on these things before all avenues of the investigation have been explored. In fact we often find the most obvious initial conclusion are later discounted.

So I apologise if I am a little vague for the moment, however what I can say for now is that regarding Carlos it looks like he suffered with an electrical problem, which unfortunately appears to have caused some rather unfortunate, and spectacular, consequences on his power unit. We will change it for another from his current pool so he will start from the grid as usual tomorrow. For Daniil we are still putting together the full picture of what caused his accident today.

I think it is only fair to say so far we see that Daniil has come into contact with the large sausage kerbs on the exit of T8 and that from the data we see some large and oscillatory loads in the suspension as a result. Unfortunately after this the car made contact with two barriers. This has left us with some damage to the nose and front of the car as well as to the rear suspension. It is likely that we will have to change chassis tonight.”

Scuderia Toro Rosso