SPARKY: Nürburgring Report
Sitting, Waiting, Wishing… Nothing

Its interesting how both Jarno Trulli and Ralf Schumacher have had success’ at the Nürburgring, yet since they joined Toyota they haven’t be able to repeat such results. In fact, Toyota has never done well here as my early research indicated, and like Imola I consider this one of our ‘poorer’ circuits, just because we have never performed well here. Like Imola two weeks ago we qualified well, but fell apart during the race. I was optimistic, if I’m being honest, that the European Grand Prix wouldn’t be the same case and we’d be able to score a nice number of points in front of a large following of Toyota employee’s. But as ever, we followed the trend.

I feel the urge to start with Jarno Trulli; some say our number one driver. He didn’t have the best of starts; a vibration problem killed his Friday practice leaving him with only Saturday to get some valuable data from. The practice session prior to qualifying didn’t look promising, with Jarno seemingly miles away from his teammate Ralf and back with the Midland’s and lower budget teams. I was therefore extremely impressed when he managed to get his Toyota onto sixth on the grid, making it through both knockouts into the final ten. Although I never saw the lap Jarno completed to put him so high up, I gathered from his comments after Saturday that he was pleased and probably relieved to be in such a good position for Sunday’s race. Ah, the race. Are Toyota light, are we going to pit three times, do we have less fuel than the cars around us, I gathered most people ran similar comments through there heads and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to mine. Jarno managed to go as far as lap 25 on what became a two stop strategy, four laps longer than Button who started ahead of him and four laps longer than Villeneuve who qualified behind him (but started one place back on the grid after a penalty). It seems Toyota aren’t gunning for glory in qualifying, knowing that its where you finish on race day that gets you the points which I guess is better than qualifying light (like Honda have done before) and ended up falling behind due to an extra pit stop or just pitting much earlier than the cars behind you on the track. Sadly in the case of Jarno his pace during the race was slower than the Midlands at times, with the Italian losing tenths in the first and third sectors and a half’s of seconds in the middle sector. It was surprising that some of the cars with a heavy fuel load were indeed faster than Jarno on low fuel and clear air. This all mounted up to Jarno losing so much time that his strategy didn’t work out and finished out of the points. Was it Jarno falling asleep during the race, or was it the tyres giving up on their run? Well, a couple of laps towards the end he did begin to speed up, but having given away so much already it was fairly pointless as he only had himself to compete against. But this was another race where Jarno has failed to score, and knowing Toyota they want results and by the way they deal with staff, if you can’t do your job your out, no matter how good everyone says you are. My thoughts are Jarno’s going to have to be on fair works come Spain in a few days time and will have to convince us all he deserves his place in Formula One.

In contrast Ralf Schumacher has become an unlikely hero, and by the look at a recent pole here at TotallyToyotaF1.com, people would prefer to see Ralf in the car next year than Jarno, a complete opposite to what was said by the fans last year… how times change! As ever Ralf was impressive in practice but that we do not judge because of the lack of running by all and the fact some teams get their third drivers to do most of the donkeywork on Friday. Qualifying was disappointing whilst encouraging, Ralf failed to make it into the final ten in the dying moments but whilst not taking part in the final session, was promoted to tenth due to an engine penalty ahead, and was able to fuel his car with the optimum strategy. But he was target in the middle of the pack, and with Ralf’s recent record of first corner accidents at the Nürburgring, things could end very quickly. Being a circuit full of trends for the Panasonic Toyota Racing, you guessed it; Ralf was involved in a first corner accident for the third time. Although there was little damaged inflicted, it obviously slowed Ralf down who was lucky not to had withstood terminal damage. Coming from fourteenth on the first lap Ralf charged up the field and by the end of his second pit stop on lap 44 was ahead of Jarno Trulli and a whole pack of cars following Rubens Barrichello. At the time, Ralf looked to be our saviour until a rare engine failure a couple of laps from the flag darkened any hope of points. The trend had continued, and Ralf was left walking back to the pits, and Toyota left with zero points.

With hundreds of Toyota supporters at the track I got the feeling they were sitting, waiting and wishing for a good result after a difficult start, and what they walked out with was nothing. But if they looked at the pattern that had emerged, they could probably just look at the positives and cast this race off as ‘one of those things’.

The positives I took from this race for Toyota was the fact our car is fast, Ralf was eighth fastest on race day, just over half a second behind the fastest man Michael Schumacher, but ahead of both Honda’s and BMW-Sauber’s. We certainly have a good top ten runner, and on its day a points scorer. I live in hope that we will see a return to the early form of 2005 before this season is over, and the TF106B could be a major step forward when it races at Monaco in a couple of weeks time. Next is Spain, where last year the team had one of its strongest races, and probably the most competitive between our two drivers. All we can ask for is the same, we are heading in the right direction, but we are still trying to overcome small problems and difficulties which are hindering our chances.