Sunday: Scuderia Toro Rosso missed the mark
Still in the running for seventh place in the constructors' standings, Toro Rosso missed their last race. Jaime Alguersuari suffered from the inefficiency of his soft tires while Sebastian Buemi could do nothing with a car set up for a wet track.
Jaime Alguersuari – 11th
It was a difficult race from the start, with little grip on the softer tires, especially in terms of traction and exiting slow corners. I struggled a lot to keep up with Buemi and Pérez. The second stint on the harder (medium) tires was much better, but it’s hard to understand why we seem to have lost performance over the last two races. Overall, I am happy to finish the season with 26 points, whereas last year I only had 5, so I hope to continue this progression by having an even better year in 2012.
Sebastien Buemi – 12th
« Obviously, we hoped to score points today, but we weren’t competitive enough and we finished 11th and 12th. I got a good start, passing Jaime and Barrichello, but after that, I quickly suffered from tire degradation, partly because we didn’t have the best setup in these conditions. In terms of performance, I did the best I could. I’m disappointed that we couldn’t get ahead of Sauber, but that’s racing. Overall, the season hasn’t been too bad, and I had some good races, but I lost points due to issues or bad luck. The team worked well, but we still need to improve in the coming years if we want to do better than that. »
Franz Tost, team director
At the beginning of the season, we set ourselves the goal of finishing at least eighth in the constructors’ championship, and that’s where we finished, with 36 points more than the ninth place. Nevertheless, having been so close to fighting for seventh place when we scored a significant number of points in Korea and India, we cannot be happy about not managing to surpass the team in front of us, failing to score points in the last two races. Regarding today’s race, Sebastien had a good start, while Jaime lost two places, and on soft tires, we struggled to keep pace with the Saubers that were ahead of us at the start. Once on hard tires, Jaime was able to close the gap but not enough to overtake. As for Buemi, he didn’t have the pace today, partly because we opted for settings that would have worked better in the rain. Work is already well underway on next year’s car, and from now on, the entire team will be focusing on 2012.
