Scuderia Toro Rosso Team Principal, Franz Tost, seemed keen to put today’s race in Malaysia behind the team and look forwards to next weekend in Japan, claiming that today the cars did not have the pace for a good result.
Tost was quick to praise Toro Rosso’s sister team, Red Bull Racing, for their 1-2 finish – the first for the team since the last race of 2013, and moving on, he seemed comfortable with the fact that his team had a much more difficult weekend in terms of pace.
“First of all, I’d like to congratulate Red Bull Racing for their 1- 2 finish here in Sepang, they did a fantastic job!” said Tost. “Regarding our race, we simply didn’t have the pace during the whole of the weekend, therefore we started from only P15 and P16 on the grid.”
Daniil Kvyat had a poor weekend, finishing in fourteenth place in a race with only sixteen finishers. Tost attributed this to the early contact that the Russian suffered from, while Carlos Sainz Jr had a more positive weekend, finishing just out of the points in eleventh place.
“Unfortunately, Daniil touched [Kevin] Magnussen’s Renault at the start, between the first and the second corner. As a result, he had to come in to change his nose and from then onwards his race was more or less lost.
“Carlos showed a competitive performance. He had a good start and gained many positions during the first lap, climbing from P16 to P11. Later on in the race and before his first pit- stop, he was able to race in P6 and keep this position for quite some time. In the final stages of the race we were simply too slow to stay in this position and ended up only eleventh.”
Despite the relatively weak performance in this weekend’s Grand Prix, Tost is already looking forward to the Japanese Grand Prix next weekend.
“Of course, the long straights here didn’t help us, but this is how it is. Now we have to be focused on doing a reasonable job in Japan next week.”
