Toro Rosso has confirmed that an exhaust failure was the cause of Carlos Sainz Jr.’s stoppage, truncating his second practice session at the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Sainz Jr. crawled to a halt along the back straight with smoke trailing from the rear of the STR12, while a flurry of smoke also arose from the cockpit, as the Spaniard came to a halt at Turn 11.
Sainz Jr. was unable to take any further part in the session, meaning he amassed only five laps during the sole representative practice session, finishing down in 18th place.
The youngster has admitted that the failure means he will head into Saturday’s qualifying session “blind” due to the lack of track time.
“It’s quite a frustrating start to the weekend here in Bahrain for me,” he commented.
“Today’s FP2 was very important and to only be able to do a couple of laps is quite unfortunate.
“This is a bit of a setback for the weekend, but we will try and analyse and pick-up as much information as possible from the others, cover this lack of data that we have right now, and try to recover it tomorrow.
“Unfortunately FP3 isn’t a very representative session either, which means we will go blind into qualifying and the race, but this is the situation right now."
Team-mate Daniil Kvyat had a more productive session and rounded out the top 10 in the sister STR12.
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