The Scuderia Toro Rosso team left Bahrain without a point. Russian Daniil Kvyat finished eleventh but Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne was forced to retire early in the race with car damage after a clash with the Lotus of Pastor Maldonado on the opening lap of the race left him massively down on aerodynamic performance.
Vergne was unhappy about how his race ended, after making a good start but finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time alongside the wrong driver in Maldonado.
“It was a bit of a mess at the start in turn 8 with a lot of cars around me, but while the others were having a poor exit I had a clean one on the outside,” said Vergne. “When I then found myself next to a Lotus, I got squeezed more and more and when he realized I was about to overtake him anyway, he just closed the door. That is why our wheels touched and my car took off, out of control.
“Both rear wing and floor got heavily damaged with a huge loss of aero performance and it was just not possible to continue my race. Hopefully bad luck will leave us alone for the next races.”
Team-mate Kvyat had another impressive race, finishing for the third race in a row but for the first time in his young F1 career, he did not score a point, finishing just outside the top ten, but less than eight seconds behind the Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen in tenth and less than thirteen seconds off fifth placed Nico Hulkenberg in the Force India. However the Russian teenager was far from happy after the race.
“Unfortunately today didn’t go as I would have liked,” said Kvyat. “I was not happy with our pace and it was frustrating to see the other cars just passing me by. The start was a little bit messy and I lost a position. From then on I tried to push as much as possible, but it wasn’t enough to get into the points today.
“We will now have to analyze carefully what went wrong today and hopefully we will come back stronger at the next race in China.”
Toro Rosso Team Principal Franz Tost cast a frustrated figure as the promise the team showed early in the weekend failed to bring the team any points on the Sunday.
“Considering our speed during all the weekend’s practice sessions, I was expecting a much better result for the race today,” said Tost. “Unfortunately Jean-Eric was hit right at the beginning: when we read all the data and realized how much downforce he had actually lost because of the damaged floor and wing, we decided to call him in.
“As for Daniil, he did a good race but we didn’t have enough speed today and we will have to investigate the reason for this in order to have a better weekend in China.”
