Toyota plans imminent updates

Gascoyne, who quit Renault last year to oversee Toyota's rise to the top in Formula 1, purposely did not intervene in the build of this year's TF104 after his late arrival at Cologne. But now that the season has started Gascoyne plans to instigate new developments to the car before Malaysia.

"We've already got several new parts on the car for this race, we have new parts for the next race, and there will be a full re-packaging of the car for Imola," he said in Melbourne. "We're not calling it a B spec but we're planning a bigger update for Silverstone that probably will be a B spec.

"The repackaging is to get the weight lower. When you're a new team you can't design a state-of-the-art car immediately - it will probably take Toyota three years to do that. Mechanically, this car is state-of-the-art but there are areas where they haven't concentrated enough on getting weight low in the car. That's what we're addressing with the package for Imola. But the aero updates are starting to come through and we're already making progress."

Gascoyne denied that there is any disappointment with the current TF104 chassis, which placed 14th, 16th and 18th fastest after the first day of free practice for the Australian Grand Prix in the hands of Ricardo Zonta, Cristiano da Matta and Olivier Panis.

"Testing has gone reasonably well, reliability is good and it's a step forward, but only of the same order that I suspect everyone else has made," he explained.

"So, relatively, is it a step forward? Probably not. At the end of the day, Toyota probably had a car capable of finishing sixth in the championship last year and they didn't capitalise on it and race it well enough. I'm going to be at all the races to make sure we do that.

"Looking at their lack of experience, I can see why they made the mistakes that they did. That's not being critical of people - that's just the way it is. Short term, the aim is to make sure they don't make those mistakes. We've got a car that is probably capable of finishing sixth, at the moment. Hopefully, by the end of the season we will have turned that into something else. But if nothing else, we have to ensure that that's what we do. And you can do that, especially with the engine regulations, by being reliable, not making any mistakes. Undoubtedly, that's the short term aim and I'm very confident we can do that.

"Engine-wise, it's very good - it's a championship-winning engine. The facilities are fantastic. The budget and everything else is exactly what's necessary to win. What's wrong is the chassis - and I know how to do that."