By Mark Esguerra
March 23 2005

In the past, one of the Toyota's biggest problems was its propensity to wear down its rear tyres too much as the race progressed.  In fact, it was a major problem on last year's car, and one of the reasons why Mike Gascoyne decided to totally redesign the monocoque and rear end midway through the season.

As everyone knows, this is the first year that the car has been fully designed with the help of Mike Gascoyne's input (working with chief designer Gustav Brunner). One of the things that I was very pleased to hear during the launch of the TF105 was that they had really focused on improving the rear end of the car, in particular, making it much stiffer. During the initial tests of the car, both Ralf and Jarno commented on how much better the rear end of the car felt.

However, as winter testing progressed, Jarno had an interview with an Italian newspaper (Gazzetta dello Sport) where he stated that the car had a problem with "excessive rear tyre wear" and that "after three laps, the car became more difficult to drive" (keep in mind that this was before the major aerodynamic rebodying of the car before the start of the season, and also during the cold winter testing).

So before the start of the season, a lot of people were writing off Toyota, saying that it would fade out during the races from excessive rear tyre degredation. Many of the major F1 websites mentioned this, and it was posted all over the F1 message boards (people were all saying that Toyota would go nowhere because it would "eat up its rear tyres"). Even I was worried that this would be the case!

That is why I am quite surprised and pleased with the performance of the TF105. If we look back on Melbourne, excessive rear tyre wear was not an issue. Jarno's car developed that right rear blister, which was more of an acute condition perhaps brought on by his pushing very hard during his first stint, or from a slight imbalance in the car's setup. It was different from the weardown issue that people in the past often referred to with the car. Ralf had no problems with his rear tyres. Then at Sepang, the cars did not appear to have any major problems with excessive rear tyre wear, relative to the competition. A lot of the other teams were counting on the Toyotas to quickly lose pace and fall back into their clutches. That is why I am extremely encouraged with how they maintained their pace, especially under those extrordinarilly hot conditions. If their rear tyres had developed overwear problems, one would have expected their car's rear tyres to have developed problems with traction, or perhaps even disintegrated. But both cars managed to maintain their pace through to the end, and that is very encouraging!

Why are the rear tyres doing better this year? It could be that the mechanical redesign of the chassis helped a lot, and also the aerodynamic rebodying of the car before the first race. The car does appear to have more aerodynamic downforce, especially at the front and midsection, and subsequently more grip. The aerodynamic changes could also have changed the car's overall balance and stability, which may have been a factor in the car's initial rear tyre wear. And so the rear tyre problems during the winter testing were overblown by the media, and this has given Toyota a huge advantage to the start of this season, an element of surprise.

If Toyota continues to demonstrate that it no longer has any problems with its rear tyres, we could really start to see them take off. We know that they are being more aggressive aerodynamically this season, and will be presenting updates at a pace faster than that of any of their competition. Couple this with the fact that they are most likely running the RVX-05 engine at a somewhat conservative level right now, in order to confirm reliability, and that they have the resourses and technical know-how in Luca Marmorini to extract performance from their engines like no other team can, then this could be a very, very exciting year for Toyota, and a major cause of shock and dismay for their rivals.


Mark Esguerra
Long Island, New York, USA