Toro Rosso qualifies both cars in the top ten for the Chinese GP

Carlos Sainz (STR11-02, Car 55)

Third Practice Session - Best lap: 1:58.800, pos. 4th, 9 laps
Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:37.656, (Q2) 1:37.204, (Q3) 1:36.881, pos. 8th

“I’m happy with my qualifying today as I’d say we couldn’t have got much more out of the car. It’s true that I lost a bit of time in the last sector, but to start from P8 tomorrow is not a bad result and we will try and go forward in the race. All in all, I’m also satisfied to have finally put a good qualifying session together from start to end this year, as during the previous two in Australia and Bahrain it’s something that I hadn’t been able to do yet. I think that tomorrow’s race is going to be very interesting strategy wise and I hope to fight for good points.”

Max Verstappen (STR11-01, Car 33)

Third Practice Session - Best lap: 2:00.150, pos.9th, 6 laps
Qualifying - Best lap: (Q1) 1:38.181, (Q2) 1:37.265, (Q3) 1:37.194, pos. 9th

“I think we’ve qualified in quite a good position for tomorrow, and to get into Q3 is always good. Of course, you always hope for more, but today it didn’t really all come together unfortunately. The conditions out there were quite tricky: the car felt a bit different compared to yesterday and the track was a bit more slippery. However, we are in the top 10 and I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s race.”

James Key (Technical Director): “A very eventful day. Today’s qualifying was an exciting session, with a lot going on. I think we come away happy to have both cars through to top ten relatively easily but a little bit frustrated that we didn’t really pull it together with the final runs in Q3. Both cars lost quite a bit of time in the third sector during their final run, which means that we are 8th and 9th when I think we could’ve been a little bit higher than that.

We clearly need to look into this and understand what happened, but it’s history now and our immediate priority is to move on and concentrate on preparation for the race. There are several strategies that need to be considered given the combination of tyres available so there may be some different approaches tomorrow. It’s also a bit difficult to predict because conditions look like they will be pretty warm so we will need to consider how this may affect the tyres and what implications there are for our plans”

Scuderia Toro Rosso