How Toro Rosso's design gap to Red Bull is closing

Toro Rosso has always had flashes of brilliance, but to deliver its potential it needs to be more consistent and understand better where it really is performance-wise. If the team can do that, then developments will be better planned and it can move forward.

After the loss of technical director James Key to McLaren, Toro Rosso has decided to form a stronger partnership with its parent company Red Bull.

This is a positive for a small team. It will not make Toro Rosso into a championship winner, but it should make it a stronger midfielder.

James was a bit like me - he didn't want to rely on others because there would be a time when it would hold you back from achieving your full potential. If you can build your own design group to a level that can design a competitive car then you're ready for anything.

Perhaps, though, Toro Rosso needed to accept that its battle is with teams such as Haas, Sauber and Racing Point, who all benefit from strong technical relationships with their engine suppliers. You could say that Toro Rosso is joining the B-team club.

But if, for any reason, Red Bull says enough is enough and doesn't want to run a second team, then what Toro Rosso is doing now makes it more or less worthless. Its own design infrastructure will have been diluted and it will basically be a race team.

Honda and Toro Rosso are heading into the second year of their relationship so they should both have a little more confidence in the areas they can optimise. Packaging the current engines isn't easy and just having confidence in the cooling requirements means Toro Rosso can alter the underbody layout.

But it's not only that, since in the second year they both know how to work together that little bit better and what they can ask of each other.

The big question is, given the closer technical relationship with Red Bull, is this a Red Bull with a different set of stickers on it?

It is the outer clothing that really gives the big performance advantages, and so as long as Toro Rosso creates that itself that's fine

I'm pretty sure it's not quite as close a relationship as that because Toro Rosso has to design its own 'listed parts', but I'm sure there will be an influence in some areas. The gearbox, driveline, uprights, suspension components, wheels, brakes, steering, etc, are all things we never really see - so why not make them the same? Yes, they can give you some small percentage of improvement in performance, but all these parts are just a means to an end. It's the outer clothing that really gives the big performance advantages, and so as long as Toro Rosso creates that itself that's fine.

The front wing and bargeboard areas interest me. The wing is similar to what we saw on the Haas. It has as large a plan area as the regulations allow with reducing element chord lengths as they go rearwards, and the rear one is more of a trip for the airflow than a flap element. This is very different to what the teams had in 2018, which was all about flow manipulation as opposed to a wing working just as a wing, and in my opinion it's a much nicer and cleaner front wing assembly.

Also, the radiator inlets are a bit like the Ferrari concept in that they are high up and more of a letterbox slot. They also have an outer shroud, which will contain and manage the spillage of the airflow when the radiator can't flow all the air being presented to it.

Managing this airflow spillage as well as possible reduces its negative influence on the undercut area of the sidepods, allowing a larger undercut. This, in turn, gives the bargeboards more room to influence the airflow coming out from underneath the chassis.

The bargeboard itself connects into a slotted floor section. Owing to the smaller bargeboards in 2019, this area will work significantly differently and this slot is to improve the performance of the underfloor.

The other part of the bargeboard hanging out in the middle of nowhere picks up the front-wheel wake and reduces its negative effect on this part of the sidepod. Coming up with these turning vanes is not easy, but sometimes mounting them is even more difficult. The mounts can very easily reduce the positive performance from a component to the extent that sometimes it's not worth fitting.

Overall, I don't see any negatives with this car. Since the front wing and bargeboard areas are the main focus of the regulation changes, I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing lots of developments in these areas.

But what Toro Rosso has introduced looks like a positive step and a good baseline.

Jake Boxall-Legge on the STR14's fine details

There's something of a duality in Toro Rosso's STR14. After the departure of McLaren-bound technical chief Key, there's been a greater desire within the team to take a leaf from the Haas playbook and use as many non-listed parts from the lead Red Bull squad as possible.

That being said, the outward design of the car seems to be an evolution of last year's - just reworked and improved for the new regulations - and featuring plenty of new aerodynamic curiosities.

If there was a design that encapsulated the spirit of the new front wing regulations, Toro Rosso's interpretation would be it; featuring five distinct elements, the wing curves upwards towards the outboard sections, looking to lend as much space to the reduced number of strakes underneath.

It seems that the engineers are relying on the shape of the wing itself to carry outboard flow rather than doing so with the endplates - which are distinctly flat-sided. Using previous examples as a reference, the design falls more in line with the concept Force India had tested last year in Hungary, with a small top flap to maintain flow attachment.

On top of the nose, the team has also retained the use of an S-duct, reworking the boundary layer with a jet of air to ensure the airflow stays attached as it faces the bulge in the bulkhead - which packages the suspension rockers and inerter underneath.

Having signed one rookie driver and one returning face, Toro Rosso needs its car to be user-friendly

The flow conditioners on the underside of the nose are also aggressively serrated, looking to capture as much airflow from the inboard section of the front wing elements. These also work with the mounting pylons - which feature three slots - to ensure that as much airflow is driven and guided underneath the nose as possible. The vortex produced by the inboard section of the front wing can then be unpacked and drawn along towards the bargeboards, which are something of an oddity.

Split into three parts, the design here looks simplistic yet aggressive; the bargeboards operate at a pretty extreme angle, and so breaking the airflow into parts ensures that it can be managed around the front of the inlets more readily.

The trailing edge of the bargeboards features a couple of dagger-like protrusions - trialled on last year's car, but to a lesser degree. These seem primed to work with lifting the tail of the tyre wake outwardly - working in conjunction with the sidepod-mounted winglets - which appear to be positioned at the most extreme outboard points possible.

Like the Haas VF-19 partially launched last Thursday, the STR14 features twin-mounted mirrors that are positioned two-thirds of the way along the sidepod - using as much of the mountings for aerodynamic purposes in stabilising the airflow along the top of the sidepod inlets.

The mirrors themselves, strangely enough, are very flat - something that seems very counter-intuitive in Formula 1. It could be that Toro Rosso is using them to redistribute the frontal pressure differential by inducing a high-pressure zone, but that admittedly seems far-fetched.

As seems to be the current trend, Toro Rosso has ensured that its sidepod inlets are as high as possible to minimise the blockage from the front suspension components - and the inlet itself seems to be very small.

Next to it, the deformable structures appear to lead into a small shroud, which collects and guides airflow down the face of the sidepods. Here, the undercut below the inlets is extreme, leading into a very compressed midriff which folds into the flared bodywork exit - retained for cooling.

In parallel with the small sidepod inlets Toro Rosso continues to run a large rollhoop intake above the drivers' heads. Both drivers are tall, so the intake has to be carefully shaped in order to minimise any potential blockage - and the position of the drivers' seats will also be governed by the need to draw in as much airflow as possible.

At the rear, there's a continuation of the noticeably tighter packaging, and that lends a view into how the parent Red Bull team will put together its own rear end. Given the increased crossover between the two teams, the sharing of rear suspension components and gearbox casings have been produced by Red Bull Technology - meaning that both squads are designing their rear end geometries within the same box.

The rear wing is connected to a single swan-neck mounting point, continuing the trend of mounting the wing at the pressure surface to improve the suction underneath the main element. This is incorporated into the DRS actuator housing, cleaning up the flow to the rear wing - and ensuring any vortex spilled off pours into the V-shaped cutout on the middle part of the top wing flap.

Angled slightly upwards, the exhaust suggests that it's blowing the underside of the rear wing, another trend that has emerged in the past couple of seasons with the centralised outlet position.

Here the fast-flowing air expelled from the exhaust develops a more pronounced low-pressure region underneath, essentially developing an extra few newtons of downforce output.

With a new technical outlook and a new driver line-up, Toro Rosso seems to be refreshed but is indulging in a familiar-looking package to retain a thread of continuity.

Ultimately, having signed one rookie driver and one returning face, Toro Rosso needs its car to be user-friendly and the Honda package needs to demonstrate the improvement in reliability it managed over last season. It's outwardly fairly simple, so there's certainly a lot Toro Rosso's engineers can do with upgrades - but can it improve on being just another midfielder?