Toro Rosso STR13 Technical Analysis

Scuderia Toro Rosso embarked on 2018 with Honda as their new power unit partner and despite the challenges of the late deal, this new works team has engineered some impressive performance into this year’s STR13. In addition to integrating a completely new powertrain concept, Toro Rosso also developed their own bespoke carbon fibre transmission, modified their rear suspension and improved their aerodynamics.

‘The 2018 car is a bit of an evolution in some areas, but in other areas we have changed things,’ explains James Key, Technical Director of Scuderia Toro Rosso. ‘As always there is a whole big slew of things that you want to account for when doing a new car, but I think the overriding point of course is pure performance level which everyone is pushing as hard as they can to improve,’ Key continues. ‘The big problem of course was that by the time we started serious work on the car for 2018 we were still early in 2017 and we didn’t fully understand the impact of the regulations, how the new wider tyres and aerodynamic changes would interact with each other. The 2nd year is always an important time to try to pick up on the areas maybe you missed on in the previous year. So, we tried to identify the areas that we felt were developing well.’

The relationship with Honda marks the beginning of a new era for Toro Rosso, because they are now a full works team, just like Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault. ‘It’s quite refreshing actually,’ highlights Key. ‘It’s great to have that level of cooperation and collaboration because it means we can very much tune the whole package, whereas when you’re a customer team you can’t do that. The other thing which is still very new to us is actually the responsibility you hold as a works team is quite considerable. Being the only team working with Honda means we have a big responsibility to them.’

A further new experience for Toro Rosso was communicating with an engine partner that is not based in Europe. Not only does this create issues with time zones, but Toro Rosso is Italian and Honda is Japanese, so both have had to communicate in their second language: English. This has forced both sides to define a very structured form of communication to ensure as much collaboration as possible.

‘We have a one team approach where we want to make the quickest package ultimately. This wasn’t possible for this year because it was a September agreement, but next year we can start very early on having an integrated chassis engine type approach which allows us to maximise both and play to the strengths of both as well,’ summarises Key.

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