By Andrew Cutler
May 11 2012

Despite all of the work that Scuderia Toro Rosso managed to accomplish in the recent test sessions at Mugello, the team still had more items to run through and/or evaluate, so Friday's Free Practice sessions for this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix were, in part, used towards that end.    

As a result, the times and 'finishing positions' of both Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne may not look very impressive, but nobody in the squad is panicking. Daniel would post an 11th best time of 1:25.367 in FP1 and a 16th best of 1:24.733 in FP2. Jean-Eric would log a 1:26.266 (16th best)in the morning, followed by a 1:24.769 (17th best) in the afternoon.

Afterwards, Chief Engineer Laurent Mekies made the following comments to the press: 

“Both our cars ran trouble free all day (DR logged 56 laps & JEV 61) which is the first element you need if you are to have a good weekend. It means we completed a lot of laps and were able to work through all the programme we had planned for these three hours. In the morning, we dedicated most of the time to evaluating a couple of components we had not managed to fit into our Mugello programme. Then, in the afternoon, we concentrated on the normal race weekend tasks of trying to find the best set-up in both qualifying and race trim. The interesting challenge here is to balance the car for the different characteristics of various parts of the track. Now we still have quite a lot of work tonight to be where we want to be, but overall this was a reasonable day’s work.”