How one team is getting eight more GPs of running in 2019

It's almost a quarter of a century since Match of the Day pundit Alan Hansen said "you can't win anything with kids" in his languid Lowlands burr, months before a youthful Manchester United team won the Premier League. Similarly, it was back in 2007 when Mark Webber famously admonished Sebastian Vettel's rear-ending crash at Fuji with "it's kids, isn't it? Kids with not enough experience...".

Then, less than a year later, Vettel won at Monza in a Toro Rosso. Bloody kids, winning.

Since Vettel's maiden victory, Toro Rosso failed to visit the Formula 1 podium again until this year's German Grand Prix, when Daniil Kvyat made a bold strategy work and pitted during the late-race safety car period. Paired with Alex Albon's excellent sixth place, Toro Rosso took 23 points home from Hockenheim - the team's highest points haul from a single race throughout its F1 tenure.

Now it's sitting in sixth place in the constructors' standings, and if Toro Rosso remains there it will be on for its equal-best championship finish to date, matching Vettel and Sebastien Bourdais's haul from 2008. This would be an impressive feat given the tightness of the 2019 midfield pack.

Although the Hockenheim podium was to some degree anomalous, Toro Rosso's championship position underlines the work that has gone on behind the scenes at Faenza and Bicester as it adapts to a new technical direction following the departure of James Key to McLaren.

Now under the watchful eye of Jody Egginton (pictured below), Toro Rosso has aligned itself closer with its senior team, taking on Red Bull's year-old designs for suspension components, gearboxes and hydraulics.

Without the need to do everything itself, the team is now spread a little less thinly. With proven parts in the car, Toro Rosso can focus on making the components it does produce with greater resources available. As Egginton explains, that's been a huge bonus for reliability.

"At the start of the year, the design processes freed up our designers who might be working on gearboxes or hydraulics to work into other areas," he says. "It's a credit to those guys, who have managed to work in different areas. And that's good, that's allowed us to look at more detail in other areas of the car. In-season, the car's been more reliable.

"We're running RB14 parts which are proven over a season and we've not had so much overhead on reliability and we've been able to use that time and resource to push on to develop the car, so that's quite good.

"As the parts are a year old - the designs are a year old, they're [parts on the car] all new of course - it's meant that we've got proven parts on the car. And statistically, we are more reliable and we've had fewer faults - be it serious or less serious - and we've got more resources in other areas. That's been a benefit, [and] that'll continue next year."

Things can always be better. While Renault's Monza resurgence contrived to relegate Toro Rosso to sixth in the constructors' championship, the current 14-point deficit was exacerbated by Kvyat's STR14 spewing oil everywhere while he was on for a decent haul of points. But that abrupt end to Kvyat's Italian Grand Prix was Toro Rosso's first proper mechanical retirement of the year, which justifies the team's technical decisions so far.

With proven and dependable parts being bought in from Red Bull, Toro Rosso can expand on its already impressive reliability by giving the car much more run time. As a team geared towards bringing young drivers into F1, its rookies therefore have the platform to enjoy plenty of valuable seat time as they become acquainted with the demands of top-tier motorsport. In turn, the team has more data available, as each car runs longer, meaning that it has much more information to make decisions on race strategy and upgrades.

"Our guys haven't gone off that much. We've not spent a lot of time in the garage with reliability issues or drivers knocking bits off the car" Jody Egginton

Although the 2019 season is not yet over, it's possible to measure how much more ground Toro Rosso has covered this season. Taking the average of the entire weekend distance - that's practice sessions, qualifying and the race - covered over the year, Toro Rosso currently manages around 944.6 miles each event. Compare that to last year's average of 871.6 miles per weekend, and it means that the team is getting an extra 73 miles in its pocket every time - almost a third of an F1-standard race distance, and the equivalent of around eight GPs of running over the year.

In addition to reliability, the extra numbers on the odometer can also be attributed to the drivers. Although a young line-up is expected to bother the barriers multiple times throughout the year, the trio of Kvyat, Albon and (since Spa) Pierre Gasly have generally managed to avoid doing so too much.

Sure, Albon was a little wayward at the start of the year, breaking a front wing in Melbourne, most of his car in China and an off in Hungary, but before his surprise promotion to Red Bull for Spa he otherwise kept it rather clean. Without an inordinate amount of shunts, that only adds to the mileage on the car.

Not bad for a bunch of kids.

"As a team," Egginton continues, "as we're running typically younger drivers, and we have a younger team, we do more mileage than most, because you sort of have to do it. And what we try to do is make the car as efficient as possible. Because early on the car seemed to work its tyres quite sensibly, and the drivers - especially in the case of Alex - got their heads around how to use the tyres quite quickly. We could focus on other things without having to give him a lot of time to understand the tyres.

"So that allowed us to bring more test items; we've done a lot more testing with aero rakes and things, we're doing a lot more data gathering and saying 'how are we going to put that to use?' and then re-evaluating at every step. It's been a slightly different approach, really. So, I think that's started to bear some fruit.

"Plus, our guys haven't gone off that much. We've not spent a lot of time in the garage with reliability issues or drivers knocking bits off the car. On a Friday, you can lose a lot of time. And we haven't had that compared to last year. For various reasons last year, not all to do with the drivers, we had a lot more off-track incidents. [This year] we've just spent less time in the garage, which means more time on track developing.

"It's also part of our faults resolution process - looking at faults and saying 'right, even though it was a small fault, what track time did it cost us?'. And that track time was useful and we've lost the ability to do something, [so] we're focusing on being on track and doing the test items.

"These niggles can add up to quite a lot of time over the weekend when we're starting to do the analysis. [It can mean] 20-30 minutes of five-minute blocks, so we focus on that quite a bit. "

In particular, the addition of the level-headed Albon - even though he is now at the senior Red Bull squad - alongside team returnee Kvyat is set to help Toro Rosso drop far below the €2million it spent on fixing crash damage last year, a result of Gasly and Brendon Hartley being involved in a handful of larger incidents.

Being able to get more run-time at each race has given Toro Rosso a deeper understanding of the 2019 aero package requirements, something that appears to have flummoxed a select number of its midfield rivals.

Although the STR14 still requires plenty of hustling from its drivers, as observed by Autosport's own Edd Straw during his frequent trackside trips, it's nonetheless a lot more palatable to handle compared to some cars. The limitations are, for the most part, consistent, and that's also helped the drivers to keep the car out of the wall.

"As everyone identified at the start of the year, there were different concepts and we had our concept and managed to develop that quite well with reasonable returns," explains Egginton. "The way we're evaluating bringing aero parts to the car now means that we'll be quite focused on sensitivities and we're not prepared to accept a map that was too peaky in the pursuit of a headline number.

"We're back to a point about the car being easier to drive and although the system of a headline number suggests the car might be a good car, if it's not easier to drive and not consistent then at the end of the race you're not where you want to be.

"That's the philosophy here. If you can do a good lap, that's fine. But if you can only do that five times out of 60, then it's not much use. If he goes off or flat-spots, it's even more frustrating."

For a young team, powered by a still-young engine project, Toro Rosso has come on leaps and bounds over the past year

By understanding the aero, it gives the team a platform to build from for the rest of the season and, crucially, for next year. The 2020 season will be the last of the current ruleset before F1's regulations are reimagined, and Egginton confirms that the anticipated STR15 will be heavily rooted in the current machinery, with some further ideas for development in the pipeline. But there's no rush to introduce them to the current car, especially in the event that they only work in very select circumstances.

"In the background we've got some alternative concepts, some are quite aggressive and the headline numbers are impressive," he says. "But until we can make it work across the whole aero map, then we wouldn't bring it to the track because aero load is fantastic but if it's giving you a limitation in high yaw conditions or in a crosswind or something, until you can overcome that it might not be a quicker car.

"So in the background we're playing with stuff and we've been fiddling with endplates and flaps incessantly all year, and the mainplane as well, but we haven't made that big step change to totally revise our concept. But it's still lurking in the background, it may make a sneak appearance, it may be something for next year."

If those ideas, when fully formed, work out for Toro Rosso, then its defence of sixth place may be successful, which would equal the team's 2008 high-water mark. Without the need to stretch its resources so thinly now that it buys in plenty of listed parts, the engineers at both its facilities now benefit from a greater focus on the parts it does produce, adding more staff numbers to bolster each department.

For a young team, powered by a still-young engine project, Toro Rosso has come on leaps and bounds over the past year, and has proven that on its day it's able to challenge the very best if the conditions are right.

And, as Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc share race victories at the front of the field, Toro Rosso's own memories of the 2008 Italian Grand Prix are proof of a simple truth, and one that Mr Hansen will have been reminded of numerous times: you can win with kids.