Big fluke? I thought the consensus was that it was a combination of:
Renault engine being crappy (hence the tuning this year)
Toro Rosso (see: Minardi) being the more experienced team, and generally getting their setups and race decisions more correct, this paid off hugely in 2008 seeing how many wet races we had or other odd circumstances.
Having clearly better drivers, Bourdais was letting the side down a bit, but he did overall have more flashes of brilliance than Coulthard did.
Gerhard Berger is (was) a good team principal.
From what the interviews (confirmed by the whole STR team), Bourdais was "the reason" the STR3 worked this well: His never-ending setup woes meant that the team tried as many possible solutions as possible, some of them quite radical - and through that extreme trial-and-error process, managed to understand the behavior of the car much better than perhaps any other team. At the same time, they used slightly-simpler versions of the RB4 - without, for example, the suspension on the RB4, which was more complicated and harder to perfect.
The ultimate reason for the Toro Rosso's victory at Monza, however, is very simple: Careful planning. While most teams opted to skip Friday testing in the wet, the STR crew tested as always. When others did limited running on Saturday, scrambling to get their wet setups right, the STRs had a strong base. That, combined with running a full wet setup (a gamble - it
could've dried off on Sunday), and taking absolutely no chances during qualifying (or just lucking out with the right time-frames, weather-wise), allowed them to gain pole position. Come race-day, the other drivers were stuck in the spray, allowing Vettel to easily put some distance between him and the ill-setup Kovalainen.
^I still don't see what you're referring to.
Please correct me, but other than the obviously different underside to the front wing, what is the difference?
The underside of the nose at launch was just the beginning - they've since increased the length to span almost the whole nose. The "new" bit is that they've blacked out that part.
Another obvious difference is the wing itself. While the previous R29 endplates used to channel air
above the wheels, they now channel it around - gaining them some 5cm or so of wing-surface, and perhaps extra downforce through endplate vortexes. The whole R29 is subtly updated at this test: The new sidepods "drape" slightly less, and are slightly tighter.
