Toro Rosso were not expecting great things today in qualifying – having brought no major updates for the STR5 to Barcelona – and so are reasonably satisfied with 15th and 16th spots on tomorrow’s Spanish GP grid.
Sebastien Buemi will start ahead of his teammate on Row 8, but thinks that without traffic he could be further up the starting order: “I expected to get a better grid position than this, as we could have got more out of the car, but I had a lot of traffic, including one incident with Rosberg on my very last lap. It was very close with myself and the three cars that qualified ahead of me all in about one tenth of a second.
“Now we must just focus on tomorrow, when we can expect a long tough race. My first aim is to finish the race without any crashes, as has happened to me so often this season and then my next goal is to bring home some points.”
Jaime Alguersuari, on the other hand, is happy to settle for 16th place on the grid for his home race: “We have to be happy with this position, as we knew some of the other teams would have upgrades for this race and we had to be realistic in terms of what we could achieve. This is a long season and we know we too will get upgrades at some point.
“I did my best and at the end of Q2 I tried for just a single lap run and got a good time, maybe good enough to get me into the points tomorrow as our race simulation in free practice on Friday went well. So I am confident for tomorrow and hope the weather stays dry.”
Technical director Giorgio Ascanelli praised both his drivers, but was critical of the conduct of some of Toro Rosso’s rivals. “We can be quite happy with this result. It was to be expected that we would struggle a bit here, as we have not brought a major update, because we currently do not have the capacity to do so.
“However, in some ways, we did better than expected, even if it's a shame that Sebastien was unable to produce a clean lap in Q2 as both of them were affected by traffic: while with Rosberg it was simply unfortunate, with Petrov it seemed to me to be deliberate on the part of his team. Having said that, traffic is the same problem for everybody. As for Jaime, he did a good job.”
