"Disappointing"

There just no way - or point - to sugar-coat, soft-peddle or otherwise spin it: Nobody at Scuderia Toro Rosso is happy with the squad's Chinese GP qualifications result, or can find any sort of 'silver lining' in it. The team came to Shanghai with a few new areo parts and tried out several set-up changes over the three practice sessions, but just couldn't find the right answers when it mattered most.  

Jean-Eric Vergne didn't make it out of Q1, and will start 18th for tomorrow's Chinese Grand Prix. “I am not feeling good after that. I’m not really sure what happened this afternoon, but we lacked speed. All we can do is try and have a good afternoon tomorrow and then improve the car for the coming races, because what happened this afternoon was simply bizarre. It’s true that I got a good result starting low down the grid in Malaysia, but it would be nice to at least start higher up the order quite soon."

Daniel Ricciardo just scraped by into Q2, but was 'tail-end Charlie' in that session, relegating him to the 17th grid spot.  “P17 is not going to put a smile on my face, as I had expected to do better today. I drove as hard as I could, but that did not produce a good enough lap time. With the package we had, I don’t think I could have got much more out of it. Hopefully tomorrow will be better and then we must look at trying to improve our qualifying performance for the next race. We are not where we want to be, especially as before the weekend, we had expected to be closer to the top ten. At the moment we don’t have the answers to what happened."

Chief Engineer Laurent Mekies summed it up like this; “Obviously, this was a disappointing qualifying for us and today we clearly lacked the pace we needed to be in the fight. We now have to look at where we lost this performance. We made quite a few changes to the cars from yesterday and during this morning’s free practice and we must assess where we did not go in the right direction. So far this weekend, we explored a quite different direction in terms of set-up and maybe it cost something in terms of ultimate pace in qualifying. However, it was a job that needed to be done and we must work out how to improve it for tomorrow."