Abu Dhabi GP: Toro Rosso Saturday quotes

Jean-Eric Vergne - 18th: "It's quite frustrating to fail to make it to Q2 today. We have been struggling all weekend with understeer and we are still trying to do our maximum and I was pushing a lot. We really only had one lap to see where the balance was this afternoon and the car seemed to be going the other way towards oversteer and I made a mistake. That doesn't mean I will have to fight the car all the time tomorrow, because there are still things we can do like playing with the front flap and tyre pressures to improve the situation for the race but it's going to be a tough night tomorrow."

James Key (Technical Director): "We had a troublesome Friday, struggling with the balance on both cars, so the team did a good job to come with some changes that produced an improvement in today's Free Practice. We moved in a stronger direction and the balance of the car is now far more driveable for both drivers. However, we really only had the three runs this morning so maybe there were further steps we could have taken if we'd had more runs. I think the outcome of qualifying was unfortunate for us: in Q1, Jean-Eric's lap was looking pretty good and he was on course to get to Q2, but he spun at Turn 20 and we will have to work out why. That effectively ended his session as he was on his new set of Softs at the time. Daniel made it to Q2, but we lacked a bit in the first corner and then in sector 3, which is downforce dominated. From what we saw on Friday our long run pace was not too bad and the balance of the cars is certainly biased towards a race configuration. The tyre situation is a big unknown and so there could be some interesting calls in terms of strategy on Sunday. Therefore we will be trying to play that card correctly."