Toro Rosso aiming to beat recession, says Franz Tost

Toro Rosso will buck the trend and increase staff numbers this year while other Formula One teams axe jobs in the face of the credit crunch, Franz Tost, the team principal, said today.
Toro Rosso, based in Italy, are the smallest outfit in Formula One, with an annual budget of just over 100 million euros, a spending level three times below some manufacturers’. Tost said that cost-cutting measures, such as a ban on testing during the season, introduced by the sport’s governing bodies will help. The team’s engine costs are likely to fall by half compared with last year. However, Toro Rosso must become a full constructor – designing and building their own car. They have previously shared their basic chassis with Red Bull, their sister team.
“We will add staff in the design department as well as the aerodynamic department,” Tost said. “But in the rest of the departments we are quite full with people. Currently in Faenza [their base] we have around 178 people and at the end of the season and beginning of 2010 I assume we will have around 250 people.”
Toro Rosso, powered by Ferrari, are the former Minardi team renamed after being bought by Red Bull in 2005. They made a big breakthrough last year when they won the Italian Grand Prix with Germany’s Sebastian Vettel.
Asked whether he felt small teams could continue to have a decent level of performance, Tost made clear that they would always be struggling to match the big ones even with a reduction in costs.
“We have to do the job as efficiently as possible, and I think we are doing this,” he said.“I’m quite sure you can’t now compare Toro Rosso with Ferrari or McLaren or BMW, they have a much better infrastructure and also more people. But we will increase our infrastructure, we will build it up and bring in people and we will see where we end up,” he added.
Tost said the extra staff would not necessarily come from other teams. Christian Horner, the head of Red Bull, told reporters at his team’s car launch last month that he expected to shed at least 20 positions while Renault have also cut jobs in Britain and France. “Every team in the pitlane will be facing a downsizing to some degree greater or lesser because of the reduced activities,” Horner said.
The former Honda team, with around 700 employees last year, are expected to compete with substantially fewer people in their new guise of Brawn GP. The Formula One season starts with the Australian Grand Prix at the end of March.

Source:the times