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2003 Season Review: Toyota F1 Design Team

2003 Season Review
By Toyota F1 Media
November 24 2003
The third part in the 2003 Toyota F1 season review focuses on the design team that produced the TF103. This includes Chief Designer Gustav Brunner, Engine boss Luca Marmorini and the 2003 General Manager of Car Design and Development Keizo Takahashi.
 
Season Review - Design Team Part One
 
In the third part of the Panasonic Toyota Racing 2003 season review, Chief Designer Gustav Brunner, Engine boss Luca Marmorini and the 2003 General Manager of Car Design and Development Keizo Takahashi discuss the progress made on the technical side over the last year and look forward to 2004 with a new car, new engine regulations and new challenges.

How did you view the team's performance in 2003?

Brunner & MarmoriniLM: All in all I am very pleased with the way the season went. We only experienced rare trouble on the engine side and I think our overall package was quite promising. We have had some brilliant performances during the year. We just need some continuity to collect more results. We are now concentrating on further development over the winter period to prepare ourselves well for the rule changes that come in 2004.

GB: In my opinion, the 2003 season was positive in many respects, but at the same time somewhat negative. The positive thing was that we obviously had a better car, which showed that the design team had made very good progress. This can be attributed mainly to the windtunnel as I said before, but also to the mechanical design. Overall, we had a good product in our hands, but I was a little bit more disappointed because we were not able to get the results we should have had. This is more a question of improving our overall organisation, in testing, racing and general co-ordination, rather than down to individuals.

KT: Our pre-season target was to qualify in the top 10 at every race and to score regular points. According to that aim, I think we achieved our targets to a good extent, but I think we should have done better. I am not unhappy with the 2003 season, but I am not entirely satisfied. As a team, we made real progress and, from an operations point of view, we can look back at our second season in F1 with a sense of pride and achievement.


What were your high and low points?

LM: My personal highs and lows coincidentally both occurred in Germany. The low point of the year for me was the engine failure we had at Nürburgring. It was made even worse because it happened right in front of the grandstand full of Toyota employees. Not a nice memory. The high point has to be the 5th and 6th place in Hockenheim. That was a very pleasing result and well deserved for the whole team. Things had been slowly coming together since Canada and Hockenheim was really the first time in the season that all the pieces of the puzzle came together.

Keizo Takahashi PortraitGB: The low point for me was the unreliability we had early in the season. We were competitive in pre-season testing and in the opening overseas races in terms of the sheer speed of the car, but we had the problem with the fuel pressure in Australia and Malaysia, which was a bit of a knock for everybody. The high points were the test in Monza before the Canadian Grand Prix, where we made big steps forward and a real breakthrough with riding the kerbs. The Friday qualifying in Silverstone was a pleasant surprise - to post a lap time of 1m19.9s was a really fantastic achievement at the hunting ground for the English-based teams. There was more than one highlight later in the season with some notable qualifying results, especially in the USA and Japan.

KT: I think that Cristiano's third place in qualifying on his first visit to Suzuka, Toyota's home race, was a real highlight. Okay, we had a bit of good fortune with the weather, but even without the rain in the latter half of the qualifying session, he would still have qualified well in the top 8 - a fantastic effort on a difficult track. Likewise, Olivier's third place in qualifying at Indianapolis was impressive, but the US Grand Prix itself was probably the lowlight of the season for me.

Luca, what was the cause of the problem at Nürburgring and how did you solve it?

LM: The problem at Nürburgring had nothing to do with the design of the engine itself, rather a production problem of one specific component that was impossible to detect on our side in the quality control. There was no direct solution to this problem, just an important lesson to give the right attention and care to all the steps (from design to production) that are the base of the quality of each of the 4,500+ different components in the engine.

How did the TF103/RVX-03 evolve throughout the year?

LM: We made 3 or 4 big steps on the engine side throughout the season - in Canada, Hockenheim, Monza and Suzuka, although there were smaller, more constant evolutions during the year. It may have only been something small like a change of internal components, but nevertheless, we made small changes over the 16 races and we essentially never brought the same engine to two races in a row. The bigger changes were predominantly to do with increasing the power and driveability of the engine to cope with the demands of high-speed power-demanding tracks like Monza together with the constant changes on the chassis side, which Gustav and Keizo can explain in more detail.


GB: We worked quite hard over the year, to be truthful. We had more than one aero update and we improved the mechanical side a lot. Compared to the year before, when our development stagnated a little in the summer, we made constant progress throughout the whole of this season. If we can keep this up for next year, then I think we can be quite hopeful.

KT: Over the entire year, the biggest improvement has come on the aerodynamics side, I think. Our engine is at a high level but the aerodynamics are important and the work has been helped a lot this year by having our own windtunnel in-house at the factory in Cologne. Of course, we can still improve a lot more, but the general direction is the right one.

Continue to Part Two
 
 
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