The Scuderia Toro Rosso team are not expecting to use the upgraded Renault engines in 2015, according to their Spanish driver Carlos Sainz Jr.
Sainz does not believe the grid penalties that taking the engines with incur are not worth the performance gain they are expected to bring despite Renault using eleven of its twelve available tokens for the upgrade.
Toro Rosso has enough of the older specification engines to last the final four races of the season, starting this weekend at the Circuit of the Americas.
“We’re going to stick for the rest of the year with the old spec,” said Sainz. “Given the [performance] values that they’ve given to get another grid penalty and start last, especially with the last four tracks, they are similar to this one…
“Okay, they are not the best tracks because they have long straights, but it’s not the worst, so we can be very close to the top ten, so to start last, I think it’s too much, it’s not worth it, so we will commit to this year’s spec that we have now, that’s good enough to finish the year, and we have plenty of them.
“It’s an important end of the season now, because we have four races that the tracks should not be bad for us, and we lost a lot of points from the middle of the season, particular me.
“We need four races where we can qualify decently and race hard from the top 10. So I don’t want to take more penalties to be honest.”
