I'm pretty sure anything Toyota dreamt up would be better than Dallara's F110 ...
Perhaps, but even so, you would have thought Sauber would build a reliable car this year too
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Consider that the Dallara's main faults are to do with non-F1 spec parts rather than just the aero.
I'm just saying its not like the Toyota would have been a Brawn, and straight-copying its design may not be entirely worth it over designing a brand new car for the regulations. Its not so clear cut just to say "copy", there could even have been design flaws in the Toyota, we will never know as it has never been tested.
We've also not mentioned how it was obviously designed for a different engine too.
I have a theory regarding Toyota's performance, I am curious to know others' opinion..
Given the relitively poor performances of Kobayashi this year (granted, last race was a slight improvement), and the fact that former Toyota driver Trulli is not exactly thrashing Lotus team mate Kovalainen each race (who, lets not forget, was roundly beaten by Hamilton last year), do you think that the Toyota was potentially a championship winning car in more capable hands? Last year's car showed some great potential at times, and I get the impression that in the hands of, say any of the eight drivers currently in the top four teams (or Kubica, or indeed Raikkonen, a target of theirs had they stayed in F1) that perhaps they wouldn't have appered so lacklustre over the past few seasons, in particular, their last.
I fully appreciate that any number of teams would perform better if they had a driver of the caliber of Hamilton or Alonso at their team, but it was at Toyota where I felt that the drivers let the car down the most.
No, you have got it the wrong way around. Trulli and Kobayashi are not performing as well this year because they are in unreliable and slower cars (interesting you avoid Glock). Trulli has had all the bad luck at Lotus, with many part failures. Kobayashi has suffered a terribly unreliable car but when it has worked, he has qualified and finished ahead of his teammate. He hasn't got that Sauber into Q3 3 times without some skill.
Is it so easy to forget Toyota's performances at Bahrain and Monaco last year? One race they completed screwed up on strategy and the other they were the worst car! Neither races displayed bad driving, they were problems and mistakes out of the drivers control.
I agree that Toyota never had a star driver, but they did have decent drivers who would have won races given the chance. Toyota were never close to winning a championship for a number of reasons, and the drivers were not really one of them.
The principle reason for Toyota's failure was the management. Apparently, all decisions had to be passed through the board in Tokyo, which slowed all the decision processes down. They also didn't take kindly to people suggesting changes to this management structure, which led to the sacking of Mike Gascoyne after one of their most successful seasons. The pit wall was also fairly rubbish overall in the latter years, some really bad strategy decisions were made sometimes losing potential race wins.
It doesn't matter who you put to drive for the team, as long as they were stuck with a terrible management they weren't going to win races. As I've also implied earlier, Toyota's aerodynamics department wasn't brilliant either. Last year they only stole a short-lived advantage with the double diffusers, and they didn't even implement that effectively if you compare them to Brawn or even Williams at times! Although saying that, they have always had a better design team than Williams it seems (that isn't saying much though).
Ralf, Panis, Trulli, Salo all performed better in other teams. Even Zonta did.
