The Scuderia Toro Rosso drivers both made it through to
the Q2 session in Barcelona this afternoon, although
they were unable to make further impression, Sebastien
Buemi getting the edge on his younger team mate Jaime
Alguersuari as they will both line up side-by-side on
the eighth row of the grid for tomorrow's Spanish Grand
Prix.The two drivers
from the Faenza, Italy-based team were split by just a
tenth of a second in the end, the Swiss pilot posting a
fastest qualifying lap in the Ferrari V8-powered STR5 in
1:22.191 to just edge out Alguersuari, who will be
taking part in his home grand prix tomorrow, and who
posted a 1:22.207.
Sebastien Buemi (STR5-02):
“I expected to get a better grid position than this, as
we could have got more out of the car, but I had a lot
of traffic, including one incident with Rosberg on my
very last lap. It was very close with myself and the
three cars that qualified ahead of me all in about one
tenth of a second. So, in general, I am not very
satisfied with my performance. However, now we must just
focus on tomorrow, when we can expect a long tough race.
My first aim is to finish the race without any crashes,
as has happened to me so often this season and then my
next goal is to bring home some points.”
Jaime Alguersuari (STR5-03):
“We have to be happy
with this position, as we knew some of the other teams
would have upgrades for this race and we had to be
realistic in terms of what we could achieve. This is a
long season and we know we too will get upgrades at some
point. I did my best and at the end of Q2 I tried for
just a single lap run and got a good time, maybe good
enough to get me into the points tomorrow as our race
simulation in free practice on Friday went well. So I am
confident for tomorrow and hope the weather stays dry.”
Giorgio Ascanelli:
“We can be quite happy with this
result. It was to be expected that we would struggle a
bit here, as we have not brought a major update, because
we currently do not have the capacity to do so. However,
in some ways, we did better than expected, even if it’s
a shame that Sebastien was unable to produce a clean lap
in Q2 as both of them were affected by traffic: while
with Rosberg it was simply unfortunate, with Petrov it
seemed to me to be deliberate on the part of his team.
Having said that, traffic is the same problem for
everybody. As for Jaime, he did a good job.”
