Scuderia Toro Rosso’s aim to finish fifth in the Constructors’ Championship has been let down by small mistakes and avoidable errors, according to technical director James Key.
The team currently sit 36 points adrift of Sahara Force India who currently sit in that fifth position, and with an increasingly outdated Ferrari power unit in the STR11, the team have a lot of work to do in order to achieve their pre-season targets.
Key has admitted to being frustrated to see hard work within the team go to waste, and feels they need to address those minor issues that often see a better potential result go out the window.
“There have been some frustrations,” said Key to Autosport. “Unfortunately, it’s a little bit of a thing with STR, we do all the hard work and then little things let us down or we let ourselves down.
“We are quite OK with performance but we know we are a bit compromised now with the engine, we can see we’re the last in the pecking order now because everyone else has developed real quick.
“There are no big issues here, we’re good as a team at the big projects. What we have to make sure is that we have everything covered in the finer detail in some circumstances.
“That can be what you do in an emergency in a pitstop if you have an unforeseen circumstance to a sign-off procedure for some system on the car. It’s just minor things.”
Key believes there is some rebalancing of personnel within the team to be done in order to improve the team, with the Research and Development team lacking some depth, meaning there is too much reliance on a small number of people.
“There’s a little bit of rebalancing in the team to do to try and get the allocation of resource a little bit better in some areas,” said Key. “We are lacking some R&D activity – which is down to resource not down to a lack of understanding – but some people are just overworked in those areas.
“So we need to try and find a way to reallocate resource to some R&D activity which will help us understand certain things better.”
