An engine shutdown was to blame for Daniil Kvyat spinning off during the closing stages of Friday’s running in Brazil, which brought practice to an early conclusion.
Toro Rosso suffered two separate failures at Interlagos, with Pierre Gasly encountering an engine issue while Kvyat’s car shut down as he rounded Juncao.
That caused Kvyat to skate through the grass and suffer light contact against the barriers, with the location of his stricken STR14 bringing the session to an early halt.
Honda confirmed that a “complete shutdown” was to blame and the manufacturer is currently investigating the cause.
It reassured that both Gasly and Kvyat were running ‘Friday only’ engines that were already scheduled to be changed overnight in favour of race-spec units.
“Yeah something broke in the car, I don’t know exactly was, the car was out of control and stopped,” said Kvyat.
“It locked on the rear and I lost control because of that, everything switched off immediately.”
Both Toro Rosso drivers were firmly in the thick of a midfield group, with Gasly classifying 12th and Kvyat 14th.
“I think it’s going to be tight tomorrow between P6 and P15 as there’s only three tenths in it, so we need to make sure we have a clean run and put everything together for qualifying because the midfield is very close,” said Gasly.
“It’s going to be an exciting day tomorrow. Towards the end of FP2 we had an issue with the engine, so we had to stop a bit before the end of the session which meant we lost a few laps on the long run, but that’s how it is sometimes.”
