Does Toro Rosso-Honda have a secret weapon?

For a man who is religiously at his desk 6.30am each morning (so he can get two hours of work done before the factory gets busy), and loves the catchphrase 'the early bird catches the worm', the start to last week's Formula 1 pre-season test must have felt like heaven.

Mercedes once again aimed to extend its tradition (in the hybrid era) of being first out on track for the start of testing, but Valtteri Bottas actually lost out in the chase to the end of the pitlane to Brendon Hartley in the Toro Rosso.

So when the lights flicked green at 9.10am, and Hartley accelerated out on to the Barcelona track, it marked a very small yet quite significant statement of intent about how much Toro Rosso means business with its switch to Honda for 2018.

While talking points from opening pre-season tests are often about which team has got it most wrong (think Jaguar in 2002, McLaren in 2011, or Honda last year), it was fascinating that Barcelona's first running of 2018 machinery instead threw up a feel-good story on how well things had gone for Toro Rosso-Honda.

We are not talking about a sensational car and engine that is ready to threaten Mercedes and Ferrari. But compared to where Honda was 12 months ago - and considering just how badly its late switch of teams could have gone - to have ended the test as the team that completed the most miles was pretty impressive stuff.

There were plenty of doom-mongers who predicted that Toro Rosso and Honda would be a coalition of chaos. With Honda set adrift by McLaren and Toro Rosso unable to match the resources of its Woking rival, this was not exactly a partnership born of success.

Throw into the mix the fact that Toro Rosso's previous relationship with Renault ended in bitterness and acrimony after an astonishing press release from the team in Brazil last year that all but accused Renault of sabotage, and there was plenty of scope for it all to go wrong.

"All the people said to us that we will have a lot of problems with communication. Absolutely not true" Franz Tost

But to think only of pitfalls would be to do a disservice to the reality of Honda's steady progress with its engine through 2017, and Toro Rosso's abilities. It would also underestimate the skills of its design team and especially its early riser and team boss Franz Tost.

The good vibes from Barcelona were little to do with solid preparations that morning to get car and engine ready in time to beat Mercedes out.

Instead it was more the end result of Tost's determination, obsession and meticulous attention to detail to make sure that the Honda relationship was one that hit the ground running in the right way.

It was interesting last week to hear Toto Wolff suggest that the 'Tost factor' could be crucial in allowing Toro Rosso to cause some surprises this year; the Mercedes boss knows his fellow Austrian is very much someone who throws himself fully into his job.

There are times when Tost perhaps takes his job to heart a little too much, and lets the emotions get the better of him - like that Brazil press release last year. I recall a time too when, sat in a Toro Rosso hospitality unit after a particularly difficult race for the team, the place descended from frenetic chatter over food to total silence after Tost stormed through and slammed the door to his office shut.

Such moments are the exception rather than the rule for Tost though, and are signs not of weakness but of just how much he cares about getting things right. Remember they say in sport, show me a good loser and I will show you a loser...

While the obsession with doing a good job may result in the odd temper tantrum then (even Fernando Alonso punched a hole in the wall of his drivers' room in Singapore last year), it equally produces a strong work ethic and prompts a thoroughness that can pay dividends.

Take, for example, the fact that Tost arranged special seminars at Faenza over the winter for his staff to help them better understand the Japanese culture. In his eyes it was money well spent in getting Toro Rosso/Honda relations off to the right start.

While McLaren often found itself exacerbated by the way the Japanese went about working, Tost is fully aware that such frustrations achieve nothing: better to swallow up the difficulties and work out how to get what you want, than throw your toys out of the pram.

"The Japanese mentality and the Japanese culture is so much different to ours, that people have to get a little bit of understanding," says Tost.

"You can't do this all in three or four seminars, but you can get a little bit of an idea how is the way of thinking and how to behave towards them. And it prevents unnecessary conflicts, which only come from misunderstanding from the communication side.

"Maybe both of you at the end mean the same thing, but it is just a different kind of telling it to each other. So far I must say it works well and we have really good cooperation."

There will be no beating around the bush. He will call a spade a spade to Honda's face in the most brutal but calmest of terms

There is one other thing to remember here too: Tost has perhaps the best experience of Japanese culture among the team bosses, having spent a year working there when he was helping Ralf Schumacher during the formative stages of his career.

Tost is also not the kind of man who is willing to sit back and mope if things are not going right. He is a hard task-master, a workaholic and someone obsessed with turning situations into positives. There is certainly no beating around the bush if he is not happy with something; and also an edge of defiance at times.

So when the critics were suggesting last year that Toro Rosso was on the road to ruin; Tost would see that as a challenge and get even more determined to prove the doubters wrong.

"It started quite late last year, and all the people said to us that we will have a lot of problems with communication. Absolutely not true," he smiles.

Rather than be obsessed with Honda's power figures, or a determination to do things his team's way because it knows best, you can already sense a more two-way relationship between Toro Rosso and Honda than either has enjoyed (or endured) with previous partners.

"You should have seen the smiling faces of the engineers when they came back from dyno run with the gearbox and the power unit," says Tost of one moment during the winter. "They said 'hey, we could change the mappings during the running'.

"Before, we got the mappings and everything was in a black box and we couldn't do anything. Even if we said 'Well, maybe this is better' or 'This is better'. 'No', they said 'Take it and that's it'.

"Now we have an impact. We can say look let's try this and this way, maybe we can get a performance advantage. And this helped a lot both sides, and therefore for Toro Rosso it was absolutely the best to decide [to have] this cooperation with Honda."

Winning kudos in pre-season testing counts for nothing, of course, when the real track action gets under way in Australia. And no one is pretending that suddenly Toro Rosso and Honda are going to come up with a car that grabs regular podiums and wins.

But there are some priceless benefits that will have come from getting their relationship off the ground in the right way. The lack of animosity and finger pointing means the two parties can work together solidly to make progress the way they want: and for Honda away from the glare of public spotlight and pressure that came with being a part of McLaren.

In Tost, too, Honda may have exactly the sort of person it needs to push it forward. There will be no beating around the bush. He will call a spade a spade to Honda's face in the most brutal but calmest of terms; but equally that may be just what Honda will need to hear sometimes. And if Toro Rosso screws up, Tost will equally be very much mea culpa.

It will be Tost's attention to detail; his work ethic, experience, willingness to listen, determination to make a success of this partnership - and those exceptionally early starts to grab Honda on the phone before its Sakura R&D facility knocks off for the night - that may well end up being the biggest help Honda could have hoped for in F1.

Hayaoki ha sanmon no toku, as they say in Japan: Waking up early brings three coins of profit (will bring good things to you).