United States GP: Toro Rosso Drivers Lacking Performance
The two Toro Rosso drivers will start outside the top 10 tomorrow for the United States Grand Prix. Vergne and Kvyat gave it their all during qualifying, but their STR9s lack performance. However, they are not discouraged and will give everything tomorrow in the race to climb up.
The performance of the Toro Rosso team is not very good following the qualifying session of the United States Grand Prix. Indeed, neither Jean-Eric Vergne nor Daniil Kvyat is in the top 10.
This afternoon in Austin, the Frenchman was eliminated in the first part of the qualifying session. Vergne encountered an issue with his power unit, which forced Renault to revert to a previous step, depriving him of necessary performance: « Unfortunately today, we had to revert to an old engine specification, so we knew that we couldn’t expect better performance. »
The native of Pontoise does not have a particularly well-tuned STR9 due to the time lost during the sessions, but he remains hopeful for the race: « The fact that I didn’t drive in FP1 and encountered these problems this morning means I didn’t have enough time to properly set up the car. Having a lot of oversteer made things complicated today in qualifying. It’s a shame, but we must move forward, hopefully we’ll have a good race tomorrow. »
Things went a little better for Daniil Kvyat, but not much more. Indeed, the young Russian was eliminated in Q2 by only setting the 14th fastest time: « Today’s Q2 was much more promising, but in the end, we couldn’t do better than that. We didn’t have the pace, and now we have to understand why. We really didn’t have the speed, and we struggled with the car, the tires, and the grip. »
But with his penalty for an engine change, Kvyat lost positions, he will start from 17th place on the grid and should serve the rest of his penalty at Interlagos, which somewhat compromises his Brazilian Grand Prix.
In the immediate future, the goal is to perform well at the United States Grand Prix, and the Toro Rosso driver is optimistic and does not intend to give up, even if it will not be easy to climb back up on the Circuit of the Americas: « We are going to do our best, extracting the maximum from the car. Yesterday’s long runs went quite well, so we’ll see what happens tomorrow. Hopefully, we can find a bit more speed and have a good race. At the Grand Prix, anything can happen, so we will continue to push as always. »
