Scuderia Toro Rosso's Vitantonio Liuzzi has admitted that simply seeing the chequered flag at the Australian Grand Prix was a good performance for a car that has had very little testing mileage.
Although the STR2 has been branded a clone of
Red Bull Racing's RB3, the car was not 'launched' until several weeks after the RBR version, and the Melbourne race weekend represented the first time Toro Rosso had had two cars on track simultaneously. As a result, the team is still coming to grips with the car, which is a major advance over the Minardi-based offerings of last season, and
Scott Speed's retirement before half distance limited its data acquisition still further.
Liuzzi, however, plugged away until the end of the 58-lap encounter, eventually crossing the line a lap down on winner
Kimi Raikkonen but running between the RBR entry of
Mark Webber and the
Honda of
Jenson Button.
"I have to say a big 'thank you' to everyone in the team who worked so hard so that I could see the chequered flag here today," the Italian admitted, "As we have been struggling all weekend, this has been a tough race for us, but it was important for us to finish to get more kilometres under our belt, as we did very little testing this winter.
"Fourteenth place is not the result we were looking for, but it was a positive day for us as we have got plenty of data from it to build on for the future."
Toro Rosso will now its rivals at the Sepang group test ahead of the second round of the season, with team boss Gerhard Berger admitting that there is plenty to work on.
"In one respect I am quite happy, because we got one car through to the finish, even though we did very little pre-season testing," the Austrian admitted, "With our late start, to get it all together for the race is a big compliment to the team.
