Head of Vehicle Performance for Scuderia Toro Rosso, Jody Egginton, seemed to be accepting of the placings of both drivers in today’s qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix – with Daniil Kvyat in fourteenth and team-mate Carlos Sainz Jr finishing in fifteenth.
“As expected, the weather has started to have an effect on the running here in Brazil,” commented Egginton. “In both sessions today we have had to be ready to adapt the run programmes and, of course, we can expect this trend to continue for the race tomorrow.”
The Scuderia Toro Rosso’s easily made it through Q1, as expected – but the problem of their obvious power deficit became prominent once more in Q2.
“Q1 passed without incident for us but we knew we had to try and find something extra to overcome our known limitations,” said Egginton. “This is why the second runs in Q1 were used to investigate a different approach which unfortunately did not yield a benefit.
“With the midfield quite tight, Q2 was clearly going to offer a challenge and unfortunately we came up short on this occasion and were not able to progress to Q3.”
Similarly to both drivers, however, Egginton seemed optimistic about tomorrow’s race – and also appears to be praying for rain.
“The set – ups the engineers and drivers have been working on together since FP1 have provided a good general balance in long and short runs so, although we are disappointed with the qualifying result, it’s just a case of ensuring we optimise the set- ups for the race conditions,” said Egginton.
“As we know from the weather forecasts, tomorrow’s race could present some opportunities, so we are looking forward to it.”
