By Andrew Cutler
March 22 2013

If Scuderia Toro Rosso didn't exactly burn up the time sheets in the two Friday practice sessions, it was an acceptable trade-off to make in an effort to see how the STR8 would react to the Pirellis on offer this weekend in Sepang. The attitude in the garage was; "If we apply what we've learned today successfully, then the speed will come on Saturday". 

Jean-Eric Vergne would be the faster of the two drivers in both sessions, posting a 1:39.284 in FP1 (17th overall) after 17 laps, and a 1:38.738 (15th overall) in FP2 after 31laps. Daniel Riccardo was not far behind in either session, with an 18th best 1:39.567 after 16 laps in FP1 and a 17th best 1:38.909 in FP2 after 31 laps.

Here are the team's post Friday comments:

Jean-Eric Vergne:

"I think this was a positive day, including the reliability front which is important. We concentrated on our long run work and we got some good answers from that, which is the most important thing, rather than looking for quick lap times. Consistent times over a distance are more important. For tomorrow, we can now look at finding more pace. Tyre degradation is quite high, but we expected that and it’s the same for everybody. If it’s dry for the whole race, tyre management will be quite tricky. I didn’t learn much on the Inters, except that driving the car in the wet on a heavy fuel load is difficult! The heat? I’m fine with it."

Daniel Riccardo:

"We learned a lot about the tyres today. In the morning, they seemed to struggle in the heat and we made some changes to help deal with that in between the two sessions. We managed to improve the balance of the car to prolong tyre life and I think we succeeded to a certain extent in doing that. We still have more work to do on that. The heat doesn’t affect the brakes much as there’s time to cool them down, but you have to watch the engine temps and also the body temperatures, because looking in the garage the guys seemed to have just come out of the shower! This is a more physical race than others and it is definitely warm, but having come here a few times, I’m prepared for it and enjoying it."

Laurent Mekies, Chief Engineer:

"It was a constructive day, as we got through a lot of laps with both cars in all sorts of track conditions, so that Daniel and Jean-Eric ran three types of tyre - the Hard, Medium and Intermediates. That was useful, because past experience tells us we have to be prepared for anything in qualifying and the race. Once again, this weekend is going to be all about tyre management, so we are working hard on getting the most out of the compounds we have here. We have explored different directions in terms of set-up across both cars, so overall, we got the data we wanted. Now we must work on that tonight with the aim of getting as much performance as possible out of our package."