Toyota Preview – Read it like a book

 It’s funny though how a simple 80 paged book can give us different outlooks on life, allow us to experience life 40 years ago, or even 40 years ahead. Sadly Toyota has been all fiction, and not very successful. But, can the new addition turn all of this around?

Testing is very much the blurb on the back of your everyday book, an optional summary, offering snippets of what might happen, but never shows you the whole story. In this case Toyota would be shown as average, not truly mind blowing, but not stupidly daft. On the other hand a team like Renault would be given an extremely positive review, but left with the question… Did they make it to the end? So my advice to you would be, if you enjoy reading blurbs and not the full story, read as much into testing as your heart desires. If you prefer to find out what really happens, the 19 race’s (chapters) ahead are just up your street.

So using testing and pervious seasons as guidance, Toyota should start making progress overtaking all of the independent teams before gunning for the world class manufactures by the end of the season. I would hope that their budget reflects week on week on development, and the car we see in Melbourne, isn’t the car we see in Shanghai. The other thing is Ralf and Jarno are going to have to work together, neither driver has shown in the past to have consistently race after race, which has damaged their points tally in having ‘off’ days behind the wheel. This mustn’t happen again, as both drivers need to be on the ball at every race, picking up positions and points. I can see Ralf and Jarno being a strong partnership when they are both fully focused on the road ahead, but once distracted; they lose the edge, which gave them that amazing skill and speed before. Also it’s a new start for both drivers, Ralf having moved from Williams and Jarno moving from Renault. Jarno does have the advantage of having driven last years machine in a race, which will be all important on learning from mistakes made in the past. But it’s not just the race drivers; the test team is also going to be a key role in their 2005 campaign. Panis whose experience from many teams in the past should help Toyota move forward on errors made from last year, plus the added bonus that his feedback will be A grade work which is very important if you want to reach the top. Then you have Zonta who will be the team’s tester on Friday’s, he will play the role of set up and tyre making choices, his input could have a knock on result onto whatever happens to Ralf and Jarno during the race weekend.

I can see this book being very colourful, moments of sadness, happiness and hopefully plenty of joy mid way though. Sadly I cannot comment on the final chapter, this I guess we will all have to find out, but hopefully a happy ending is just around the corner, and a positive finish is on the cards too.

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