Daniil Kvyat lead the way for the Scuderia Toro Rosso team on the opening day of the Italian Grand Prix as he finished ninth in the opening session and thirteenth in FP2.
Completing a total of 70 laps throughout the course of the two sessions Kvyat was hoping for more, “It was a busy day today but unfortunately we are not yet where we want to be” he said.
“With the warm temperatures, it was a bit tricky out there and tyre management wasn’t easy. We still need to work on the car balance, which I wasn’t very comfortable with today. So we still have some homework to do tonight in order to get the most out of the car for the rest of the weekend.”
Team-mate Jean-Eric Vergne suffered a frustrating time, the Frenchman completed a total of 63 laps with a fourteenth and fifteenth place in the respective sessions.
“I wasn’t really happy with the car today.” said Vergne. “Tonight we’ll look at all the data with the engineers with the aim of getting the right solution for tomorrow and as much performance as possible for the rest of the weekend.”
Chief Race Engineer Phil Charles was generally happy that the team managed to complete their planned test programmes but admitted there was still some work to be done. “We had a couple of small issues on JEV’s car towards the end of FP1 and in terms of performance, we are not where we would want to be.
“The main complaint from both our drivers appears to be a lack of grip, although Daniil still managed a long run that wasn’t too bad. We have more work to do to give JEV a car he likes, but with both of them we need to find a few tenths.
“However, we now have all evening to look at the data, try and analyse what the cars are doing and then hopefully find a way to be stronger tomorrow, with one more hour of free practice still at our disposal.”
Ricardo Penteado from Renault Sport F1 was positive. “We pushed the Friday Power Unit to a very high mileage with no major problems to report. Equally we tested some new software, which helped with the energy management and power optimisation.
“We had a small issue with the CUH this morning but it was resolved for FP2 and we were able to run through our programme. Although performance is not exactly where we would like, there is still more to come tomorrow.”
