STR's boss reflects on 2006 season

By Scuderia Toro Rosso
October 30 2006

Now that the 2006 F1 season is over, it's time to find out what STR's team principal, Franz Tost, thinks of the outfit's maiden campaign. Here in his own words is his assessment of the accomplishments and the challenges remaining.

"When Red Bull bought Minardi, we had to restructure the team. We built up a new organagram and brought in new people and I would say that
from the beginning to where we are today here in Brazil, we can seen signs of improvement and we operate quite well as a solid team unit. The job
we did this year is not too bad, because we finished the majority of races. We suffered just one technical failure that occurred on Scott’s car in
Barcelona. As for the rest of the races, on the reliability front the results were good with the drivers seeing the chequered flag most of the time. In
total there were six times a driver did not finish a race because of a spin or an accident.

However, we are not yet where we should be, which means we will have a lot of work to be done during the coming winter months. But on the
positive side, I can see that the team itself has a lot of potential. I am convinced that with a handful of new people joining us, we can move up a
notch and reach a standard where we will be able to participate in a more competitive way in this sport.

If I had to single out a best moment from this our first year in F1, it definitely came in Indianapolis, when Tonio picked up the first ever point for
Scuderia Toro Rosso. Another highlight came courtesy of Scott in Australia, when he produced a very good performance in only his third ever Formula
1 race. He finished in the points until the Stewards took his eighth place away. In any case, he had shown an excellent turn of speed that day and
again in the final race of the season, he had a very strong race. These were the highlights of our year."