Tost: Toro Rosso now gelling well together

With the Red Bull-owned outfit having made a noticeable improvement in performance at the end of the season, Tost reckons that one of the key reasons for the progress was in the way people interacted.

"The team is coming together," Tost told autosport.com. "The reshuffle of an F1 team, to build up such an organisation, is not possible to do in one day. You have to find the correct people, and they have to work together.

"As you know in F1, you never have technical problems, you only have personnel problems. Sometimes, this is much more difficult to sort out than some technical problems.

"But I am very optimistic for the future because the team are coming together more and more. People understand more and more how important it is to do a disciplined work, to listen to each other and support each other, and not work against each other. Therefore we are looking forward for the next season."

As well as being satisfied with the way the entire personnel have moulded this year, Tost also thinks that the arrival of technical director Giorgio Ascanelli, plus driver Sebastian Vettel, were key to the strong finish to 2007.

"There are different reasons why the last races we were so successful," said Tost, who saw a Toro Rosso lead a race for the first time in the Japanese Grand Prix.

"First I would say reliability. After Giorgio Ascanelli's arrival at Toro Rosso, the reliability improved in a tremendous way and reliability for me is the first and the most important step to come forward. As long as you don't see a chequered flag you cannot be successful.

"Then I must say the second most important point are the drivers. When Sebastian Vettel joined the team, we quite clearly felt an improvement from the whole team.

"Vettel is a very highly skilled driver, his technical feedback and his technical understanding of what is going on in a race car are important for our engineers to analyse what is going on during a race or after the tests."

Heading into 2008, Tost thinks that the spirits will have been lifted by their performances at the end of the year.

"It is very important for this young Toro Rosso team that they see that they can compete, that they are able to compete against the other teams," he explained. "This confidence ends up in more motivation; more motivation ends up in better work. It is always a circle.

"I am happy that we achieved the success at the end of the season, so it is good for the winter time to have this bridge for hopefully starting a successful year in 2008."