Toro Rosso's Verstappen is top 10 on qualifying for the Bahrain GP

Max Verstappen (STR11-01, Car 33)

Third Practice Session - Best lap: 1:33.778, pos.15th, 20 laps
Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:31.888, (Q2) 1:31.772, pos. 10th

“It was quite a good qualifying at a track that isn’t the strongest for us, so to be that close to Q3 is quite a good achievement. Of course you always want to end up further up, but we have to be realistic and try and make it a good race tomorrow. The good news is that we can choose on what tyres to start on tomorrow, so all in all it’s not a bad result. During the Free Practice sessions over the weekend we’ve also been focusing a bit more on the race because we didn’t have that many Super Soft tyres compared to other people, so I’m looking forward to tomorrow – it will be a tough but very interesting race!”

Carlos Sainz (STR11-02, Car 55)

Third Practice Session - Best lap: 1:34.003, pos. 16th, 20 laps
Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:31.716, (Q2) 1:31.816, pos. 11th

“I think we did a decent job in today’s qualifying as we knew that with the amount of Super Soft tyres we have, getting into Q3 was difficult. We still managed to put a good lap together and even though I’m not entirely happy because my lap in Q1 was faster than in Q2, we are quick and I think we have a good chance of scoring points tomorrow. We have some interesting tyre options for the race and I’m therefore looking forward to it!”

James Key (Technical Director): “We knew that out of the first four events this year, Bahrain was always going to be the trickiest one for us and unfortunately this proved to be the case today. This is a stop-start track, where longitudinal performance is a bigger player than lateral performance, and we are weaker in longitudinal than lateral… So it’s not playing to the strengths of our car as much as other circuits will be. The nature of this track is also to pull the field a lot closer and so it was very tight between teams today.

Unfortunately we didn’t have enough tyres to do a proper job in Q2 with only one set available – had we had enough for a proper Q2 I think we could’ve got one, if not both cars, through to Q3, but with this format of qualifying you’ve got to have a certain quantity of tyres to make it work and we only had a single set of tyres for Q2. Having said that, we’re just behind the Q3 line-up, we have the choice of tyres for the race start and that gives us a little bit of an advantage for tomorrow. We’ve now got some work to do this evening but hopefully we can have a stronger race performance and finish with both cars in the points.”

Scuderia Toro Rosso