Toyota to keep focus on 2009 car

The Japanese car manufacturer headed into this campaign adamant that it needed to deliver a win to ensure its future in the sport.

And although the signing of the Concorde Agreement suggests the team's senior management has seen enough to remain committed to the sport, Toyota F1 president John Howett says it is doing everything it can to achieve its main objective.

"We still have targets to reach this season so we have not even considered switching all development to the 2010 car," said Howett on Tuesday. "Significant work is going on in parallel on the 2010 car, as was always planned, but we are still working hard to extract more performance from the TF109.

"We have an extremely competitive baseline this year so the challenge is to keep up development and unlock all the potential of our package. We have a duty to ourselves, our partners and fans to push on at full throttle with our development programme but, more importantly, we know the leading cars are not out of reach so we must fight for every bit of extra performance."

He added: "Our organisation exists to win races so that is always the goal and this year I believe we are closer than ever to doing that. But the surest way of winning our first grand prix is to pursue a relentless development programme, driving performance on.

"This is a team effort and everyone is working flat-out together to fulfil the huge potential of the TF109. We'll see how the rest of the season goes but we have the passion and dedication to win this year."

Howett has said that he has been impressed by the behind-the-scenes efforts taking place at Toyota's Cologne headquarters to keep pushing on with improving the TF109.

"We have been focused and ambitious in our development," he said. "Maybe it's not obvious to outsiders just how much development is going into the TF109 but we are pushing extremely hard to improve every conceivable area, with a particular focus on aerodynamics.

"Our development schedule at the start of the season was very ambitious and we have pushed on with that. We have made several significant steps forward this season which have certainly brought performance increase."