Tost: 2010 'a landmark year' for Toro Rosso
Tost is aiming to finish the year in the top eight of the constructors' championship standings
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By Tom Powell. |  |
Monday, 01, Feb 2010 06:03
By Adam Leveridge
Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost said 2010 will be a landmark year for the Faenza-based outfit, now they are going it alone.
The team have announced they are detaching themselves from Red Bull to abide by the new formula one regulations, which state that teams must design and build their own cars.
And, after four years of working with Red Bull, Tost said 2010 will be a important year for Toro Rosso now they have more resources of their own.
"2010 is a landmark year for Toro Rosso as the new regulations demand that we go it alone in terms of designing and building our car in-house," he said.
"After four years of working in collaboration with Red Bull technology, the STR5 is the first car that is 100 per cent down to our own endeavours.
"Creating the necessary infrastructure to tackle this task has been our biggest challenge, possibly more difficult than actually producing the car itself."
Toro Rosso have taken on an additional eighty staff and have also purchased a wind tunnel from Red Bull in an attempt to increase their rate of production.
And Tost says his aim for the 2010 season is to finish the constructors' championship in the top eight positions.
"It will take time for the highly skilled team we have assembled to learn to work together as efficiently as possible," said Tost.
"Making predictions for the coming season is a dangerous trap.
"But if pushed, I would say we must aim to finish in the top eight in the constructors while giving our young drivers everything they need to improve, as well as optimising our infrastructure in order to be as competitive as possible in 2010 and beyond."
Toro Rosso's technical director Giorgio Ascanelli has revealed that the STR5 is fundamentally the same as last year's car, with a few minor tweaks to its design aimed at bringing it in line with the revised regulations.
"We were blessed with the fact that last year's design from Red Bull was a bloody good car, but I should make it clear that we did a lot of our own design work last year and that none of the manufacturing was done by Red Bull," said Ascanelli.
"We used several outside suppliers and, currently, we are increasing the ratio of how much of the car we build ourselves to the number of components we have to outsource."
The first day of testing in Valencia didn't go as planned for the Toro Rosso team, as their STR5 suffered a gearbox failure and missed out on hours of essential track time in the afternoon.