Toro Rosso had an uneventful Friday in Turkey today and Sebstastien Buemi finished the day 15th, ahead of teammate Jaime Alguersuari, who was 18th.
Speaking after the two practice sessions, Buemi was happy with his efforts and is looking forward to the rest of the weekend: “We had a lot of things to test today and the programme went quite smoothly. I think we have seen what we needed to see from the data side, so we have a clear picture of the car, which is positive.
“It was a good day for us, even if the circuit was very dirty this morning and took a long time to clean up. The high temperatures were useful, as it should be like this on race day and at the moment I am feeling quite confident for the rest of the weekend.”
Jaime Algueruari was not as content as his teammate with the performance of the STR5, but enjoyed his first experience of Istanbul Park. “To be honest, I find it difficult to assess how we got on today,” said the Spaniard.
“We tried lots of different things on the car and my team-mate was on a different programme, so it will be up to the engineers to analyse what we have done. From inside the car, I never felt I had a good grip level.
“Overall, I am not so happy with today's performance but hopefully we can put everything together and have a much better day tomorrow.
“It's my first time here and I enjoyed the circuit which is interesting and challenging with a good mix of high and medium speed corners.”
Chief Engineer Laurent Mekies explained where the focus of Toro Rosso was today, and their plans for the final practice session tomorrow morning: “Today's programme involved evaluating new components on both cars, which meant that unlike a usual Friday, we did not focus so much on pure race preparation, regarding it more like a test session.
“Now we have to look at our data and take the best of the elements we tried on the two cars and then make the right decision in terms of how to progress tomorrow.
“Of course, we also went through the normal procedures of doing a tyre comparison, different fuel scans and other basic race weekend work.”
