Toyota disappointment
Ferrari's qualifying hat-trick at the six hours of Imola annihilated their opponents who on the Santerno track never appeared capable of troubling the 499P even during free practice. There Toyota was expected in this second race of the season as the protagonist by the Ferrari drivers themselves but qualifying showed a very large gap between the Ferraris and the Toyota GR010s which, despite having two very fast drivers like Kobayashi and Hartley, were unable to do better than the seventh and ninth times on the grid respectively.
The race pace leaves no hope for the Japanese
Brendon Hartleyin his post-qualifying statements he paid tribute to the great performance of Antonio Fuoco by recognizing the difficulties of the Toyotas on the Italian track:
“Fuoco had an amazing ride. Running 1:29.4 would have been unimaginable for me today. I think today we had the pace to place between third and fifth position but unfortunately on my first flying lap I had to slow down in the last sector as I was approaching Kobayashi. On my second flying lap I spun so I only had one attempt left where obviously I struggled to put together my best lap. However, I congratulate Antonio for his performance. Tire warming is a really critical factor here and it will be so in tomorrow's race too. It takes a really long time to bring them up to temperature despite the fact that the temperature wasn't that low. I imagine that tomorrow it will be difficult to have a clean race having to fight on the same piece of asphalt (referring to the limited width of the track ed.)”.
The New Zealander sees only a points finish as a plausible objective for Sunday's race
“Victory? There's always a chance but in terms of race pace the Ferraris are unapproachable and the Porsches are also fast. We know that anything can happen in endurance racing and I'm sure there will be mistakes from some riders and we will have to be good at capitalizing on everything possible. We will try to score as many points as possible but as said on the race pace, from what we saw this weekend we are quite far behind.”
His teammate echoes him Kamui Kobayashi who, despite not having made any driving errors in qualifying, calmly recognizes that the gap with the Ferraris appears unbridgeable
“I think we have to be happy with what we achieved because based on what we saw, pole position was unattainable for us. The Ferraris have been fast since qualifying and we have never been able to run the same times so I don't see why we should be able to do it in the race. This is what we have available now and we are more than a second behind the Ferraris and there was really nothing left to extract from our Toyota. I see the podium as possible only if the Ferraris have problems otherwise we will only be able to watch them occupy the top three places at the end of the race.”
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