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Toro Rosso Launches STR8 In Spain

JEREZ, Spain- Following the earlier launch of the
Mercedes W04 out onto the circuit, the new Toro Rosso STR 8 was launched in the
pit lane early in the afternoon on Monday.
The Faenza, Italy, based team is targeting sixth
place in the constructor’s standings and will retain last year’s drivers
Australian Daniel Riccardo and Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne. The new car employs
a vanity panel over its scheduled step nosed design and has a similar exhaust
system which resembles last year’s model.
However, this season the new challenger has the input
of designer James Key, who now is technical director who was at Sauber the
previous season. But the Englishman really was very realistic about the car’s
chances.
“Certainly
it’s a very ambitious target,” Key said, “but its right to be
ambitious as well. Everyone in the team is very clear that we are not going to
be happy with P8 or P9 and we’ve got to try and do more than that. There’s no
harm in aiming high, it’s a really good motivator.”
Key
also is doing away from last season’s double undercut side pods and has made it
very clear to remain with the basics before moving on to bigger agendas.
“What
I said to the guys was that the baseline of the car needs to be worked on here
and let’s not push on the special stuff like the exhausts and the additional
projects over the standard bread and butter aero plan,” Key said.
“What we needed to do was get the baseline of the car up to get the
fundamentals right and then start applying all that stuff. So that’s why this
[the current car] is a very basic start point and there’s more to come.
“We’ve
got some bits coming to the next test and the test after that which will
visibly change the car for Melbourne. We’re working now on the future steps and
it will evolve for sure and we’re looking at some quite fundamentally different
approaches that will eventually come to life later in the season. If we’re
going to go from where we were [last season] to where we’d like to be, we can’t
just throw bits at the car at every race, we’ve got to step back and think
about what we’re going to achieve.”
Cepsa , an energy company
based in Spain, along with the ever popular Red Bull energy drink, will remain as
title sponsors and will guide the team to achieve higher placings on the grid.

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