FP1 & FP2 Bahrain GP report: Toro Rosso Renault

Daniil Kvyat

“Overall, this has been a good day for us, as I managed to do a lot of laps, with no big problems. It was the first time I have driven under the floodlights and that was fine. Comparing the two tyres, clearly the Soft is much quicker than the Medium but in general this evening all the lap times were faster because of the big drop in temperatures once the sun went down. We will now analyze all the data with the engineers and I hope we can have a strong remaining weekend.”

Jean-Eric Vergne

“It was not a bad Friday, even though we didn’t start the day with a perfect car. Overall, we improved in the second session and I’m sure we can make the same step forward for tomorrow’s FP3. We certainly need to analyse all the data carefully tonight, but I’m confident that there is still more speed to come, so this was an encouraging start.”

Phil Charles (Chief Race Engineer)

"It was quite a good day for us and we are pleased how we were able to work through our programme today. We have done a number of chassis tests today with both cars, which worked out reasonably well and we got some interesting data from that. It’s quite tricky to deal with the condition change from the hot P1 to the much cooler P2, but we’ve managed this quite well with both cars. There is still a bit to analyse tonight and try to get the maximum out of the car for the rest of the weekend, but overall we are quite happy and both drivers did a good job.”

Ricardo Penteado (Renault Sport F1 track support leader)

“A very busy but ultimately productive day with a lot of miles. We completed our programme and overall our energy management has improved a lot over the day, which will allow us to recalibrate our simulations overnight and come back fully prepared for Qualifying tomorrow. The only issues have been relatively small: Daniil lost some time in the morning with an oil leak and then in the afternoon with a small issue on the wastegate, but once both were identified they were easy to fix and did not impact the information we needed to get. We’re happy with how the day went.”