Toro Rosso’s Kvyat: Fastest lap was not “balls out”

Daniil Kvyat says his headline-grabbing time on the third day of Formula 1 pre-season testing was not “balls out”, but urged Toro Rosso to remain realistic. 

Kvyat turned in an eye-catching late effort to set the fastest lap time of pre-season testing so far and dispose Alfa Romeo’s Kimi Raikkonen from top spot on the third day of the opening test in Barcelona. 

The 1m07.704s lap time was posted on Pirelli’s softest available tyres – the C5 – and saw the Honda-powered Toro Rosso driver edge out Raikkonen’s morning benchmark by 0.058s. 

“I wouldn’t say it was balls out or anything,” Kvyat replied when asked how on the limit he was. 

“You don’t want to end up the day in the wall, but you try to feel the car as much as you can in those laps the engineer give you, and you cannot keep driving around slowly. It was not too bad. 

“I would be lying if I’d say I’m not pleased with today’s result but we have to be realistic. We have to keep on working, do a lot more laps, understand the car better and extract more performance out of it.”

Kvyat only managed 77 laps on the first day of running and was pleased to have “bounced back” in terms of mileage as he racked up 137 laps on Wednesday. 

“We lacked some running on day one and today we definitively bounced back on that area, we recovered pretty much all the running we had lost,” he added.

“But we always want to do more laps, if we had the chance to do 200 laps we’d take it. My neck wouldn’t like that, but I would take it. 

“The priority was to bounce back after the first day of mine which wasn’t ideal. It was a productive day, so the guys must be happy with the work they have done and we have to continue to do something similar to get mileage as much as possible and gain the confidence together.

“Even without looking at the time sheets – and we don’t need to look at them at this stage, we knew we were in for a good run – today was good.”