Bourdais left hoping for more speed

The Frenchman and team-mate Sebastien Buemi finished at the bottom of the times in today's practice, albeit less than two seconds off the pace.

Bourdais believes things will be better for his team tomorrow, but the former Champ Car champion admitted he would have wanted to be closer to the top of the times.

"A tough day and I wish we could have been a bit higher up the order," said Bourdais. "We are not such a long way off, but there is a little bit missing to put us in the fight. I know that tomorrow will be better, but today we struggled to get the tyres working properly.

"Usually, the soft is quite a bit better, but today it didn't bring anything and it was harder to drive with it. In terms of balance it seems like a 50-50 split between oversteer and understeer, but the main problem is lack of grip.

"Now we must look at all the data and see how we can improve for tomorrow. There have been other races this year where we've been a long way back on Friday and then made good progress on Saturday, so we will see..."

Buemi conceded it was hard to tell where Toro Rosso was, the Swiss complaining about problems to get the best out of his tyres.

"My first day in an F1 car at this track was a very difficult one," admitted Buemi. "On the plus side, we had no mechanical problems, so we did a high mileage. That means at least we have a lot of data to analyse to work out why we are slow and hopefully find a better set-up for tomorrow.

"At the moment, it's difficult to say where we are, although obviously we are not where we want to be. The main problem today was that we could not get the most out of the tyres. Compared to the others, we are not too bad on a long run, but on new tyres, it wasn't working one hundred percent."