"How well the car performs is the result of all the different departments within the team, not just the technical department but the whole organisational structure of the team and down to the detail of how the mechanics build the car. At this point in the season, I can see the people now pay more attention to detail and this is the first step to improving performance and we are working in the right direction.
"Our co-operation with
Red Bull Technology has always been good, even if we are competing with Red Bull Racing and both teams are made up of very competitive racers. I can only say thank you to Red Bull Technology, because the people there around Adrian Newey have done a tremendous job, as we can see from the STR3. Unfortunately, the new car was a bit late - if it had been finished a month earlier, allowing us more testing time to acquire more data, our performance could be better now."
Technical director Giorgio Ascanelli shares Tost's appreciation of the work that has gone into producing the STR3, but admits that the team could have capitalised more on getting the older car ahead of its newer rivals at the start of the year.
"We had decided to start the season with a modified version of the '07 car and on balance, we have no regrets," the Italian insisted, "Currently, we are just one point short of our total for the whole of last year, so we must have done something right!
"I don't regret any decisions we took but, in the early part of the season with STR2B, we picked up fewer points than we should have done. This was not because we were using the old car, but rather it was down to the way we ran it and an unexpected reliability issue which was due to problems on quality control from a supplier. All the evolution components we fitted to the STR2 completed big mileages in winter testing and, when we came to the races, they then threw up some difficulties. Nevertheless, we picked up two points in the first five races using this car.
