Reaction Phil Charles after qualifying Japan

Published on 26 September 2015 by Niels Hendrix

Phil Charles, chief race engineer of Scuderia Toro Rosso, says after the qualifying in Japan: “It obviously hasn’t been the qualifying session we were hoping for: Max started his session pretty well and was very happy in Q1. Unfortunately, he had a systems black-out at the end of Q1 which we are still investigating in order to understand what happened. I think he would have had a decent qualifying session without this issue, as he was getting better and better and the car was performing well.”

“Carlos had not run here in the dry before today and was steadying himself in nicely through P3 and into qualifying. He was improving lap after lap but unfortunately on his last tyre set in Q2 we found a small issue on the car, which meant he wasn’t able to better his first run in that session. This is a shame, because he was doing a good job and I think he could have been a bit higher than P12. So we have got a bit of work to do with both cars tomorrow: There is some wet weather forecast in the morning which would definitely be welcome and Hulkenberg has a penalty from last race which promotes Carlos one place.”

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