16 http://www.racecar-engineering.com SEPTEMBER 2019FORMULA 1 – TORO ROSSO STR
Plan B
Toro Rosso has once again produced a solid F1 car in
the STR14, but it’s the Red Bull B team’s completely
new aero approach and build philosophy that are the
really exciting developments at Faenza. Jody Egginton,
STR’s technical director, talked us though these
changes and the racecar that’s the result of them
By SAM COLLINS
F
ormula 1’s only official B team was
created out of what was once Minardi
when Red Bull acquired the Faenza,
Italy based outfit. The team that was
the result of this, Scuderia Toro Rosso, now exists
chiefly to give young drivers an opportunity to
prove that they are worthy of a seat in the main
Red Bull Racing team, and the title challenging
expectations that come with this.
Despite this unique driver-focussed
approach the Toro Rosso team has always done
things its own way technically, and that was the
case even when it was using chassis designed
by Red Bull Racing. Yet with its 2019 F1 car the
team has in fact taken something of a different
direction, in terms of both the aerodynamic
development and the car build.
Work on what was to become the STR
began in the early part of the 2018 Formula 1
season. The team developing the car was split
between two main locations, Toro Rosso’s mainfacility in Faenza and also its wind tunnel and
technical centre in Bicester, England.
Despite a significant change in the
aerodynamic regulations for 2019 the Toro
Rosso engineers started the STR14 project by
looking at the shortcomings they had already
identified with the Honda-powered 2018 car,
the STR13, and then they set about resolving
them. But to do this the team first looked at why
those shortcomings existed in the first place.
‘We had a list of things we considered
weaknesses with the previous car, from that
we worked out what our priorities would
need to be to improve the competitiveness
of the car,’ Toro Rosso technical director Jody
Egginton says. ‘Last year we brought a couple
of updates to the track which didn’t deliver
everything we expected. Some of the things we
learned from this we put into the changes we
made for this car in terms of how we develop
it aerodynamically. We’ve had a really bigevaluation and thought about a lot of things,
we’ve got quite a young engineering team but
the guys have worked hard over the winter. We
changed a lot of stuff in the background. One
of the big things is that the way we develop the
car in the wind tunnel has changed.’Wind power
Toro Rosso has its own 50 per cent scale open
jet wind tunnel, and this has been undergoing
some upgrade work recently. The facility
was originally built by Reynard and was later
acquired by Jaguar Racing, which later also
acquired the former Arrows and British Ministry
of Defence tunnel near Bedford. When Red Bull
purchased both the Jaguar team and Minardi,
the latter was given the Bicester facility to
develop its cars. The tunnel is thought to be
similar in design to ARC in Indianapolis and
the Penske facility in Mooresville, NC, but it has
undergone many upgrades since it was built.