Toro Rosso, Sainz: “Difficult to get into Q3”

Tenth and eleventh places for Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen in qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix, the second round of the 2016 Formula One World Championship. The Scuderia Faenza, despite the failure of both cars to reach Q3, said they were very satisfied with yesterday afternoon's qualifying, underlining that the minimum objective in the race is the points zone.

Here are the words of Max Verstappen: “It was a pretty good qualifying considering this track isn't exactly the best for us, so being so close to Q3 is a pretty positive result. Of course you always want to finish in a better position, but we have to be realistic and try to have a good race tomorrow. The good thing is that we will be able to choose which tires to start the race with, so all in all it wasn't a bad result. During the free practice sessions this weekend we focused a little more on the race, because we didn't have many supersoft tires compared to the other rivals, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow. It will be a tough Grand Prix, but very interesting!”.

Here are Carlos Sainz's impressions: “I think we did a good job during today's qualifying, because we knew that with the number of supersoft tires available, getting into Q3 was difficult. We still managed to put together a good lap, although I'm not really satisfied with it, my time in Q1 was better than that in Q2, but we are fast and I think we have a good chance of scoring tomorrow. We have some interesting options on the tire front for the race, so I'm looking forward to it!”

Roberto Valenti