James Key: “P5 for Max is an excellent result”
Published on 19 March 2016 by Niels Hendrix
James Key, technical director of Scuderia Toro Rosso, says after the qualifying in Melbourne: “There were a lot of unknowns going into today in many respects. Firstly, it was not until today that we were able to run in dry conditions, so there was much to learn for all teams. Secondly, a new qualifying format and finally and most difficult to predict, to know exactly where everyone was, because winter testing is so difficult to predict. I think we did the right thing in free practice by trying to get some race data early on, as many other teams did, because clearly we were missing a lot of information due to yesterday’s weather conditions. This gave us some valuable data for tomorrow.”
“The good news also is that the car seemed to be well balanced on the super-soft tyres for qualifying during the FP3 runs, so we were quite encouraged by that. Although Max wasn’t that satisfied with the balance of his car in this morning’s FP3, Carlos was reasonably happy and did a good and competitive lap time. For qualifying, we didn’t know how best to approach it, but we followed our plan and I have to say it worked pretty well. Both drivers did what we needed from them of their first timed lap in Q1. As a precaution, we sent Carlos out again but in the end we didn’t need to. That meant he needed to survive in the first part of Q2 with a used set of tyres, which he did well. Max was on new tyres and the second run for both of them in Q2 put them through quite safely into Q3.”
“With only eight cars being up there, it was great to see that we could achieve it with both of our cars. A P5 for Max is an excellent result, and a P7 is also great for Carlos, even though I feel a little sorry for him because his Q2 lap was extremely competitive and sadly he didn’t quite get that lap time in Q3. I think the track was a bit slower but we know that we could’ve been on the third row today with both drivers, and I think Carlos deserved to be there. I’d also like to say thank you to the whole team for such a good job – it’s a very well deserved result after an extremely busy winter!”
