Plan B
Formula 1’s only official B team was created out of what was once Minardi when Red Bull acquired the Faenza, Italy based outfit. The team that was the result of this, Scuderia Toro Rosso, now exists chiefly to give young drivers an opportunity to prove that they are worthy of a seat in the main Red Bull Racing team, and the title challenging expectations that come with this.
Despite this unique driver-focussed approach the Toro Rosso team has always done things its own way technically, and that was the case even when it was using chassis designed by Red Bull Racing. Yet with its 2019 F1 car the team has in fact taken something of a different direction, in terms of both the aerodynamic development and the car build.
Work on what was to become the STR14 began in the early part of the 2018 Formula 1 season. The team developing the car was split between two main locations, Toro Rosso’s main facility in Faenza and also its wind tunnel and technical centre in Bicester, England.
Despite a significant change in the aerodynamic regulations for 2019 the Toro Rosso engineers started the STR14 project by looking at the shortcomings they had already identified with the Honda-powered 2018 car, the STR13, and then they set about resolving them. But to do this the team first looked at why those shortcomings existed in the first place.
‘We had a list of things we considered weaknesses with the previous car, from that we worked out what our priorities would need to be to improve the competitiveness of the car,’Toro Rosso technical director Jody Egginton says. ‘Last year we brought a couple of updates to the track which didn’t deliver everything we expected. Some of the things we learned from this we put into the changes we made for this car in terms of how we develop it aerodynamically. We’ve had a really big evaluation and thought about a lot of things, we’ve got quite a young engineering team but the guys have worked hard over the winter. We changed a lot of stuff in the background. One of the big things is that the way we develop the car in the wind tunnel has changed.’
Wind power
Toro Rosso has its own 50 per cent scale open jet wind tunnel, and this has been undergoing some upgrade work recently. The facility was originally built by Reynard and was later acquired by Jaguar Racing, which
