Scuderia Toro Rosso’s Chief Designer Ben Butler and Technical Director Giorgio Ascanelli have taken time out of their busy testing schedules in Valencia to shed more light on their latest F1 car and the team’s new-look set-up.
“The STR5 is definitely a case of evolution rather than revolution,” says Butler (pictured, above left), new to the team this year along with around 80 other staff taken on to develop Toro Rosso as a fully-fledged constructor. “We have taken a fantastic 2009 package as our starting point and we did not want to do too much with it, apart from changing and adapting it to take into consideration the regulation changes.”
So, if it is an evolution, is it essentially an STR4 with a new paint job? Not at all, says the 35-year-old, whose previous teams include Lotus and Stewart Grand Prix.
“It is easy to say there is little change between the 2009 and 2010 cars, but there have been a lot of significant evolutions that we have had to put in place, primarily to ensure reliability.”
Ascanelli (pictured, above right) also points out that even the STR4 of last year wasn’t just an off-the-shelf buy-in from Adrian Newey’s RBT studio in Milton Keynes, but a unique Italian production.
'I should make it clear that we did a lot of our own design work last year' – Giorgio Ascanelli
“We were blessed with the fact that last year’s design from Red Bull Technology was a bloody good car, but I should make it clear that we did a lot of our own design work last year,” says Ascanelli.
So what were the challenges tackled by Ben Butler’s new-look design team?
“The use of the double diffuser led us to look at the design of the gearbox to accommodate it, and the need to carry more fuel [as the rules now ban refuelling during grands prix] inevitably led to a longer car,” says Ascanelli, “[but] we have obviously tried to recover some of that length by looking at the gearbox design.”
This off-season hasn’t seen the sea-change in regulations and look of the cars faced by the teams after 2008, but this year’s STR machine reflects the abandonment of some of those innovations, including the haphazard Kinetic Energy Recovery System, initially lauded by some as the future, but which ended up being run, not entirely reliably, by just a handful of teams by the end of last season.
“Another change is that the ’09 car was designed to accommodate KERS,” Ascanelli adds. “This year, all teams have agreed not to run it, and that has made our task a little bit easier.”
'Everyone is good at something, but it takes time to find out exactly what that is' – Ascanelli
As Ascanelli explains, the move from customer to constructor is one that takes time.
“We have acquired the former Red Bull Racing wind tunnel in Bicester [in the UK], [and] employed some rather good people to work there… We also have increased our manufacturing capacity by acquiring several new machining tools. But these are not things you can go and get off the shelf from the local tobacconist!”
Like any good team, roles and personalities need time to gel, and that is what Ascanelli believes this season will be about.
“Everyone is good at something, but it takes time to find out exactly what that is.”
Keep up with the team’s progress at tororosso.com
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