Friday practice report

By Andrew Cutler
April 6 2007

According to Scott and Tonio, Scuderia Toro Rosso is still paying the price for the late roll-out of the STR2 in regards to pace. Nonetheless, they are both talking up the car's - and the team's - potential for improvements in the near future.

While Felipe Massa dominated both friday testing sessions at Sepang in his Ferrari, the STR duo ran around in the bottom half of the grid on the time charts. Liuzzi would post the 13th fastest first session time at 1:38.882, 3.91 seconds off of Massa's pace. Speed notched the 18th best time with a 1:39.130. Both drivers would improve their marks in the second session, Tonio was up to 1:37.550 and Scott reached 1:38.650, but so did most of the rest of the field, so they dropped to 17th and 20th on the carts, respectively.

Here are their post-session comments as reported by F1Live.com:

Tonio Liuzzi

“We have found some improvements on the car in the slower sections, where the car is beginning to react quite nicely. We tried various mechanical changes that seemed to work. As we have said a few times already this year, we are still paying the price for not having tested much in the winter, but I am sure that the arrival of Giorgio Ascanelli brings us a plus and a lot of information and so I think we should be able to make a step forward quite soon.”

Scott Speed

“Track conditions seem similar to those at last week’s test, so no big surprises from that point of view. I’m glad we got that opportunity to test because today I never got much proper running. First off in the morning, I had to run the T-car, because it had never been used before today and that meant the usual stuff with a new car, like sorting out the pedals and the driving position. Then I had to sort out my own race car so I only really ran properly at the end of the second session. At first sight, my prognosis for here is the same as in Melbourne, meaning we are still quite a bit off the pace.”