By Andrew Cutler
June 22 2012

Once again, the Friday practice session time sheets do not paint an obvious and immediately rosey picture of Scuderia Toro Rosso's potential for a boost in their recent fortunes during the European GP weekend: And, once again, the team is saying; "Don't worry yet; we were just gathering data to optimize our qualiying and race strategy."

Towards that end, STR had Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne trying out a variety of tire, fuel and down-force options so that the engineers can - hopefully - deduce which ones will be the most productive for qualiying and the race.

Daniel posted the 19th best time in FP1: a 1:42.777 while logging 28 laps. In FP2 he was 18th, with a best lap (out of 32) of 1:41.121.

JEV was 18th best in FP1 on the strength of a lap at 1:42.758 (out of 27). His FP2 best (of 29) was 1:41.263, which was 20th fastest overall.

Here are the teams' post FP comments:

Daniel Ricciardo:

  "The track was quite dirty in the morning session, with some litter on it, blown across by the strong wind, but it cleared up as the afternoon went on. The wind actually affected the car in a few braking areas when it was blowing as a tailwind. As for the car, when I was running in more of a qualifying trim, we seemed to be lacking a bit of performance. On my long run at the end of the second session with more fuel on board, I certainly felt the car was better, so that was more positive. Therefore, we need to improve the car on low fuel and I think we have an idea how to do that, so we will study all the data now and put together a plan for tomorrow. I am confident that, tomorrow, we can move up a few places from where we are now."

Jean-Eric Vergne:

  "I have raced here before, a few years back in GP3. Of course, it's a very different circuit from the cockpit of a Formula 1 car, but at least I had some idea what to expect. We did a lot of work on set-up, trying things linked to the exhaust system configuration that was first used by Daniel in Montreal. In general, we need some more speed and a couple of tenths off the lap times, because we are not fast enough. I think if we can make just small improvements in a few areas, then we can find more pace tomorrow."

Laurent Mekies (Chief Engineer):

"It was a standard Friday practice with both drivers running similar programmes as we concentrated on getting the cars to work well around here in these very hot conditions. We scanned a variety of set-up options and began to assess the tyre life of both compounds with a view to Sunday's race. In the afternoon, our drivers split this task, each doing just one long run, using different compounds. Overall, it was a trouble free day in the heat of Valencia and now we have to work hard tonight to put together the best package we can for both qualifying and the race."