Toro Rosso once again proved that their cars were quicker in wet conditions than in dry as they went backwards in the race.
Australia's Daniel Ricciardo had managed to qualify an excellent eleventh on the grid in wet conditions on Saturday, but eventually dropped to thirteenth after an encouraging run in the race. He is still yet to score any points since the first race of the season in Melbourne.
“I had a normal start and held position on the opening lap, so at least we did not make life more difficult than it needed to be. However, it was clear in the opening laps that I could not patch the pace of those cars around me and I was fighting quite a bit with some understeer. After that, I lost places to the Saubers and Rosberg and could not stick with them. At the first stop, I asked for some more front wing to get rid of the understeer and the second stint was a little bit better.”
“I ran the final stint with even more wing and that was the best the car had been all afternoon and I was hoping to catch Di Resta, but with eight laps remaining, I started to lose grip at the rear end and that was it. We tried a bit of everything today, but unfortunately we did not have any answers,” he bemoaned.
Jean Eric Vergne finished one place behind Ricciardo in fourteenth, after starting fifteenth due to several penalties for other cars. He was briefly delayed by a puncture and recovered from twentieth position.
“I am at the same time disappointed and happy at the end of this race: happy because the performance was quite good and disappointed as we were unlucky to have a puncture, which meant I had to make a very early stop which ruined the race. Actually I had a bad start, dropping to 20th but still, I managed to cross the line 13th at the end of the first lap.”
“The car was running well enough to get a better result. The car definitely seems to be working better than it did in the last few Grands Prix, so that gives us hope that we can improve still further at the next race. We only have a few days to go till Hungary where I have usually gone well in the other formulae, but this is Formula 1, so we will have to wait and see,” the Frenchman added.
“Yesterday, we saw that as expected, we were more competitive in the wet, which meant Daniel started from eleventh and Jean-Eric from fifteenth. However, in the dry, our car is lacking some pace at the moment, so to finish thirteenth and fourteenth is about the best we could have expected from a race with just one retirement and no possibility to gain any advantage through strategy,” Franz Tost concluded.
