Key: "We have a little bit of an advantage"
Published on 02 April 2016 by Bas Winckels
James Key, technical director at Scuderia Toro Rosso, commented after qualifying in Bahrein: "We knew that out of the first four events this year, Bahrain was always going to be the trickiest one for us and unfortunately this proved to be the case today. This is a stop-start track, where longitudinal performance is a bigger player than lateral performance, and we are weaker in longitudinal than lateral... So it's not playing to the strengths of our car as much as other circuits will be. The nature of this track is also to pull the field a lot closer and so it was very tight between teams today."
"Unfortunately we didn't have enough tyres to do a proper job in Q2 with only one set available – had we had enough for a proper Q2 I think we could've got one, if not both cars, through to Q3, but with this format of qualifying you've got to have a certain quantity of tyres to make it work and we only had a single set of tyres for Q2. Having said that, we're just behind the Q3 line-up, we have the choice of tyres for the race start and that gives us a little bit of an advantage for tomorrow. We've now got some work to do this evening but hopefully we can have a stronger race performance and finish with both cars in the points."