Nobody Said That It Was Going To Be Easy

Scuderia Toro Rosso needed to 'regroup' a bit after the disappointing results of the previous two races, and certianly hoped that qualifying for Sunday's Spanish GP would show that they were on their way towards that goal: However, it was not to be, at least in any obvious way.

After Jean-Eric Vergne dipped below the 1:24 mark (1:23.833 to be exact) during the FP3 session, posting the 7th best time, the squad probably felt that they were on to something, but it would not last. Once qualifying began, both drivers made out of Q1 - just barely in Vergne's case. Q2 started well enough, with our boys setting early times that were well in the top ten, but late runs by others found them being shuffled down the grid order, ending up sharing the Row Eight for tomorrow's race.

Here are their post-qualifying comments:

Jean-Eric Vergne (starting 15th):

"I have mixed feeling about this qualifying, because from a personal point of view, I feel that I did a better job than I have done in the other sessions this year and for the first time this year, I have out-qualified my team-mate. On the other hand, I think that we are lacking something from the car side. Everyone in the team has worked hard to bring updates for this race, but the others have done the same and apparently did a bit more than us. We still have some work to do, but on the positive side, we improved the car from yesterday and I feel that our pace over a long run is pretty good, so we will have to see what happens tomorrow. I don't feel it is too unrealistic to try and aim for some points."

Daniel Ricciardo (starting 16th):

"This was not an ideal session for me. From yesterday, I felt that we were trying to chase a better balance on the front and rear of the car and allthough we made a substantial change overnight, it did not have as much of an effect as we had hoped for in terms of lap time or feeling in the car. In Bahrain I had a great Saturday and a poor Sunday, so let's hope it's the other way around this time. I'm not going to dwell on today's performance and now I'm just focussed on having as good a race as possible."