Toro Rosso hiring more engineers for 2010

Talking to the red bulletin, Toro Rosso's team principal Franz Tost has revealed that the team is currently focusing towards next year's design. New people are being hired and technical director Giorgio Ascanelli is leading the structuring of the new department.

Tost said he is reasonably happy with how the things so far went into this season. The team has scored 5 points which is well within the expectation range of the team. Even after getting the car very late and having little time to get to understand its characteristics, there haven't been major problems so far.

Nonetheless, Tost agrees that the team still lacks a little bit of experience to set up the car perfectly. He also mentioned to be happy with Buemi and how he has taken to F1 but remained surprisingly silent about teammate Sebastien Bourdais.

Back in the factory however, the team is focusing heavily on next year, the first in which Toro Rosso will completely design its car itself rather than relying on Red Bull Engineering.

"Well, Giorgio [Ascanelli, technical director] is currently very, very busy," Tost said, "and has to stay in Faenza organising this, which is why he hasn’t been at the last two races. We are building up our infrastructure, especially the technical side. To design everything in-house means bringing in designers; building up the aerodynamic group in the wind tunnel and also the CFD (computation fluid dynamics) department. The racing team will not change."

"When I took over the team from Minardi I think they only had around 90 employees. We already have 200. At the end of this season we will have around 250. I think this is the number that can do proper F1. It should not be more than that."

"We have a very competitive car this year because the team around Adrian Newey did a fantastic job. Some ideas from our people will feed in, but they will be concentrating on next year’s car. With our structure and our number of employees, we are not in a position to run a double programme; designing a car for next year is a tremendous job by itself because regulation changes mean the car will be completely different to this year."

Tost also commented on FOTA's cust cutting ideas and expressed his support to big reductions in the cost of engines and gearboxes: "We have had meetings over the last couple of weeks designed to cut material costs and the number of people travelling to races. I think these will work and be tremendous steps forward."