Toro Rosso expects early mistakes

The Faenza-based squad has used the designs of Red Bull Technology in previous seasons, but has had to build its own car for the 2010 season.

To do that, Toro Rosso has had to increase its staff significantly over the past months and Ascanelli is aware that a young team is likely to make mistakes.

And the Italian says that is one of the reasons why he has pushed his team to have the car ready for the first test this week.

"First of all, we are blessed by good design," Ascanelli said at Valencia. "It is no question that the Red Bull last year was a bloody good car, so I think that helped us this year. Second point is we did quite a lot last year in terms of systems, like cooling, like gearbox, like hydraulics, like fuel tank, like fuel systems so last year was like this year.

"Of course the manpower required to do the car is much larger, because mostly the models we use to make the car faster which are wind tunnel and CFD were not in our hands, so our first step was to gear ourselves with a wind tunnel, which we have acquired the Bicester tunnel that used to be the Red Bull tunnel and stop for only a couple of years.

"We had to have the people to run the tunnels, which means designer, aerodynamicists, model makers, purchasing office and so on, so we have a small facility in England now who are good guys I have to say, and then we have acquired a cluster to produce calculation of CFD.

"The drawing office needed to get more powerful and we increased by three times the size of the drawing office compared to what we have, and also the stress department and R&D have been increased."

He added: "Finding people is never easy, finding good people is very difficult, and once you find people you have to put them together and there is everybody is good at something you have to know what it is they are good at, you have to take your time to understand what is the best way to use some people.

"The process takes some time, I am expecting mistakes because a young team takes time, and this explains why we are early. I tried to push the car on the ground as soon as we could, to give us time to react to the issues and the problems which for sure we are going to get."

Ascanelli refused to set goals for the new season yet, and said the main priority was the understand the car.

"I would like to have enough running to clarify all the reliability problems we are going to get, and if we are lucky we will try to understand the low working range compound, which we will probably not see until Bahrain and Melbourne..."