Q3!!!

By Andrew Cutler
September 29 2007

With the morning practice session essentially rained out, Scuderia Toro Rosso took a gamble on chassis set up today, giving Sebastian Vettel a 'wet' car and Vitantonio Liuzzi a 'dry' car. It paid off, especially for Vettel, as the squad from Faenza notched their best qualifying results ever.

The young German's day was particularly impressive given that he spun out twice in the Q1 session and then did it again - only once, this time - in Q2. Nonetheless, Vettel became the first STR driver to break into Q3, where he qualified 9th on time: Nico Rosberg's ten grid spot penalty means that Sebastian will actually start 8th.

Tonio's day wasn't quite as good, but this is mainly due to running his car in a 'dry' set up. He qualified 15th, but will start 14th (again, thanks to Rosberg's situation).

Here are their post qualiyfing comments:

Sebastian Vettel, Toro Rosso (9th, 1m 26.973s):
“Definitely a good day and a great experience for the team to get to Q3 for the first time. Fantastic! It was difficult not having any free practice this morning and it was the first time for me driving this car in the rain this afternoon. It feels good and I looking forward to tomorrow now. I think if I had managed that final run, I could have improved by up to two places but we went for a last minute strategy change which meant I lost the last lap. When you start high up the grid you expect a better than usual finish position. Hopefully there will be some more rain which would help us and then we will see how far we can go.”

Vitantonio Liuzzi, Toro Rosso (15th, 1m 26.948s):
“This result is okay. We took a gamble in terms of set-up strategy and I set off with quite low wing, as if for dry conditions, while we put Sebastian on wet settings. We knew it would be difficult in the wet, but we are hoping for a dry race tomorrow for which we now have the right settings. Overall it was a good qualifying as I don't think I could have got more out of my car. More rear wing definitely helped Sebastian make it to Q3. But I am really positive about tomorrow if it is dry, so the real situation for me could be better than it seems.”

Giorgio Ascanelli, Technical Director:

"One car was set up for the wet & one for the dry, so the one set up for the wet is P9 and the other is P15! Probably we could have made it to P8, but we just missed a flag at the end of the session which was a shame. But both drivers performed well. In some ways, being in Q3 could actually give us a more difficult race. But let us wait and see as the outcome will depend partly on the weather."