Sainz: "Hopefully we can still fight"

Carlos Sainz has said that his Toro Rosso team will have to work hard to find a compromise this weekend with their year-old Ferrari power units set to hamper them on the high-speed Baku City Circuit.

However, he stopped short of writing off his team's weekend, saying that the team performed strongly on the quick Circuit Gilles Villeneuve at last weekend' Canadian Grand Prix, so could potentially perform well in Azerbaijan this weekend.

"I don’t know, maybe we need to take off the rear wing! It could be a challenge for us, for sure," he said. "We will be working a lot on the set-up to try to find a good compromise but you know in Canada we were expecting to be weak and we were not at all weak, we actually had really good pace in the race, so it doesn’t mean that because of that long straight here we cannot compensate with our good car, our good package and be strong."

Although optimistic of a strong showing, the Spaniard conceded that the team will struggle to match their impressive pace from the Spanish and Monaco Grands Prix.

"Obviously we are not going to be as fast as in Monaco or Barcelona for sure," he admitted, "but hopefully we can still fight the teams that we are fighting now -  Force India, McLaren -  for those top ten positions.