STR Saturday Qualifying Recap
By Andrew Cutler
June 10 2012
Scuderia Toro Rosso tried to take what they had learned from the Friday Practice sessions and use it to set up their cars for a strong FP3/Qualifying effort on Saturday. Unfortunately, Jean-Eric Vergne put his STR7 into the Turn 2 tire barriers before he could even log a signle timed lap in FP3, causing him to miss the entire session.
It also undoubtedly effected his qualifying performance, as he was still unfamiliar with the car's Saturday aero set-up. As a result, he would fail to get out of the Q1 session, settling for the 20th starting spot for Sunday's Canadian GP.
For his part, Daniel Ricciardo had a much more straitforward day, logging 19 laps in FP3, then advancing into the Q2 session, where he would grab the 14th grid spot, just ahead of the two Williams cars.
Here are the teams' post-qualy comments:
Daniel Ricciardo, starting 14th:
"This result is not too bad, considering the pace we showed so far this weekend. Fourteenth was probably about the best we could have done as there is a three tenths gap to thirteenth place. I managed to out-qualify some of our usual competitors, but fourteenth is not going to set the world on fire and we always want to do better. However, we can be satisfied with the way we improved the car over the two days, taking a step forward and hopefully we can make further progress tomorrow."
Jean-Eric Vergne, starting 20th:
"My little mistake in FP3 cost me a lot. I didn’t get any running this morning and then this afternoon, I never really got a clean lap, encountering a lot of traffic which is therefore very disappointing. On top of that, my car was quite different today to yesterday, so it was not the easiest thing to adapt to it in just a couple of laps in Q1. Even if the traffic would not have made a huge difference to my position on the grid, some cleaner laps would have allowed me to improve my performance and get a better feel for the car with this different set-up. ...We always have a good car for the race, so let’s wait and see how much ground we can make up tomorrow."
Laurent Mekies, Chief Engineer:
"Yet another very tight qualifying in which Daniel performed well. ...As for Jean-Eric, he paid the price for not running in the morning session, after his early off-track moment. Making his job even harder this afternoon was the fact we had made several changes to his car overnight and it is never easy to adapt to something new when your first time in the car is in Q1. ...As ever, we can expect a very eventful race in Canada and, as we have seen that our race performance is frequently better than it is in qualifying, with such a tight field, this extra relative pace might allow us to fight for the mid-field honours tomorrow."
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For Dan, I hope he can hold his position and improve during the race. I am getting worried about him.
