Brunner: TF104 an All New Design

Toyota's chief designer Gustav Brunner says every part of this year's TF104 car is new compared to last season's TF103 machine.

"We have adopted similar principles for the TF104 race car to the ones we followed when producing the TF103," Brunner said. "Using Toyota's philosophy of continuous improvement, the fundamental concept was again that of evolution not a revolution.

"The TF103 and TF104 may appear visually similar, but we have looked at every single part of the car, studied it, redesigned it and improved it. There is no carry over from last year's car, but we have worked on every single part to make it lighter, stiffer, more reliable and with better overall performance."

Toyota said that underneath the evolutionary bodywork, the car's internal components have undergone a significant reassessment and redesign that they are confident will reap rewards in the long term.

The Japanese squad have signed former Renault technical director Mike Gascoyne, who will be in charge of the technical side of the chassis. Gascoyne also sounded optimistic about Toyota's prospects for 2004.

"The entire design team has done a very good job on the TF104," said Gascoyne. "It appears to be a solid car, but we will have to wait for testing to see precisely how good it is. 90% of chassis performance is in the car's aerodynamics, and that has been the priority on the TF104.

"We now need to look at ensuring short-term consistency to get the best from the car, the drivers and the team in 2004, whilst concurrently adopting a longer-term approach to get Toyota to the front of the grid in the future."

Luca Marmorini, the team's engine technical director, said the new RVX-04 unit, designed for the new regulations which allow only an engine per driver per weekend, will not suffer from a drop in terms of power despite having reliability as their top priority.

"With the new rules, we have had to look at doubling the engine's life expectancy from 400km to around 800km," said Marmorini. "Our guiding principles when designing the RVX-04 have been to increase the durability, whilst simultaneously maintaining the driveability and the performance from 2003.

"I honestly do not think that there will be such a drop in horsepower with the new engines, but we have had to work a lot on the lifing. The RVX-04 was fired up on the dyno in October and was run for the first time at a test on 25 November in the TF103B interim car.

"We will continue to work on this before we go to Melbourne, but I am confident that we are up to this new challenge."