Difficult 1st Friday session of '07

By Andrew Cutler
March 16 2007

The 2007 F1 season didn't get off to the best of starts for Scuderia Toro Rosso. The first GP Friday practice of the year for Tonio and Scott was a rough affair. Each would suffer spins in turn during the two sessions and finished well down the time charts.

Scott would lose it in the first session, held during a light drizzle which made the track "greasy" and kept the speeds down for all drivers. Fernando Alonso would be fastest with a time of 1:29.214. Tonio was 15th fastest at 1:34.627 (+ 5.413) and Scott's best time was a hefty 1:41.763 (+ 12.549), 21st on the field.

A drying track meant that second session times were up a bit. Felipe Massa would be fastest at 1:27.353. Scott would be 19th at 1:30.383 (+ 3.03). Tonio would not make it off of the bottom of the field with a time of 1:31.693 (+ 4.34) before having his "off".

Here are their post-practice comments as reported by F1live.com:

Scott Speed

“As expected we are quite far behind at the moment as we learn about a lot of things that we should have done in testing. Lots of stuff on the car is brand new for today and so inevitably some of it didn’t work. The one positive element is that it is clear that we will be able to develop this package through the season and can do something with it. It’s going to be a tough time until we get some more testing under our belt, as we seem to be quite a way off the pace, unless some of those ahead of us were on low fuel loads.”

Tonio Liuzzi

“Quite a negative beginning. We had a few problems with the car, as it was very unstable at the rear. We did not really reach an understanding of what was causing it. Then I had a spin and damaged the rear wing and underside of the car, so I had to stop before the end of the session. That was a shame, because at the moment we really need to do as many kilometres as possible. Hopefully we can do more laps tomorrow.”