Toyota drivers to blame for poor German performance?
The Panasonic Toyota racing team introduced their new TF-104B at the German Grand Prix last weekend and despite securing the fourth fastest lap in the race, something Olivier Panis accomplished due to a late pit stop, points were still far from arriving.
However, in all fairness, had Olivier Panis started from his ninth placed grid position instead of pitlane due to not one, but two stalled attempts to get off the line, then the final outcome may have been different. Teammate Cristiano da Matta didn’t enjoy a problem free day either, the Brazilian forced to retire with a punctured Michelin after picking up debris from Kimi Raikkonen’s earlier accident.
The team’s technical director, Mike Gascoyne, isn’t directly blaming his two drivers, who will be replaced at the end of the season, for not bringing home points in the team’s home event, however he has stated that it wasn’t the fault of the new car ….
“There’s nothing wrong with the car, not a single problem,” he told Autosport. “I’ve always said that if you do the wind tunnel testing properly and make it work to the right level of accuracy, then what you have in the tunnel is what you have at the track, as happened with this car. I don’t think we’ve got any issues.”
“We were able to get the car dialled in pretty quickly, so we don’t have any issues from a set-up point of view. We don’t need to learn anything more from the car. We’ve got the performance gain we expected and we’ve got a new package coming for Monza, so I’m confident we’re going to score some points, but it’s just frustrating because we should have scored them here.”
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