By Nick Sparkes
May 31 2006

Toyota’s Ralf Schumacher has given his early judgement of the TF106B that debuted at last weeks Monaco Grand Prix, and the news wasn’t good. To Ralf, the TF106B hasn’t solved one their main problems, aerodynamics, which hasn’t been their strongest area since entering the sport. Whereas McLaren, Renault and Ferrari have designed very sleek and stunning racing cars, which are forever leading the grid and winning races. At the other end is Toyota, who have designed probably one of the most ugliest cars on the grid, with as many extra wings as a fleet of Boeing 747’s. Undoubtedly these extra wings are designed to get back some of the downforce lost via the rule changes, but surely with the reintroduction of tyre changes, our supplier Bridgestone would had made a much more stickier tyre thus allowing our car to loose some of those additional wings. Sadly the TF106B continues to look like a badly built aeroplane, which according to Ralf Schumacher, hasn’t helped our aerodynamics. "We have a very strong team but I think we still have an aerodynamic problem. Before we can really start to improve we have to get to the bottom of it.”

To make matters worse, Ralf also feels we are no where near the front running teams, in fact, we are more mid field. "In my opinion we have the sixth fastest car at the moment". In other words, we’re behind Renault, Ferrari, McLaren, Honda and Williams. It looks like the team has plenty of work to do before we expect those ‘big’ results we were promised six months ago.