Toro Rosso 'encouraged' by STR5's reliability

Toro Rosso have been encouraged by the reliability of their new STR5 during the past two weeks of testing at Jerez.

The STR5 marks the first car designed and built by the Toro Rosso team as in previous years they have drawn on senior team Red Bull's experience.

But with 'customer' cars now banned from F1, Toro Rosso had to do the hard themselves.

The team launched their STR5 ahead of the second pre-season test and spent the past two weeks putting the car through its paces at Jerez.

And although the team has encountered some minor problems along the way, the final day at Jerez saw Jaime Alguersuari complete the equivalent of over two race distances.

"That is encouraging on the reliability front," said Chief Engineer, Laurent Mekies.

"Even with the rain interrupting our programme this week, it has been quite a useful test, working on both dry and wet weather basic set-up.

"However, there is still a fair amount of work to do before the first race in Bahrain and we hope to get a lot more testing miles under our belt, in Barcelona next week."

Toro Rosso 'encouraged' by STR5's reliability - Planet-F1 News from planet-f1.com