Phil Charles: “First day back at school”
Published on 18 March 2016 by Johan Peeters
Phil Charles, chief race engineer of Scuderia Toro Rosso, says after Friday in Melbourne: “First day back at school! I had been looking forward to this day for a while as I expected it would be the first time this year where we would really start to learn where we rank as it is so difficult to judge in winter testing. Unfortunately the famous four-seasons-in-a-day Melbourne weather meant that we didn’t really get to fill in all of those question marks in either session.“
“Carlos had some problems in FP1 so we had to apologise to him after this morning’s session. On the positive side we managed to put those issues aside in FP2 and we managed three decent runs with him on intermediate tyres.”
“As for Max, we had a better FP1, managing some runs on inters and a couple of short blasts on dry tyres in between the showers. We managed to collect some useful aero data during these runs and we will spend some time tonight going through it in detail. For FP2 we were ready for some more dry running with Max, but since he had already done some laps on intermediates in the morning, we didn’t need him to go again in wet conditions. In the end we simply didn’t get the dry conditions we wanted to send him out. I’m sure he will be chomping at the bit to go again tomorrow!”
