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Scuderia Toro Rosso reveal STR5 - The brand new F1 car is revealed in Valencia

Published by Mr. C

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The Toro Rosso team unveiled their 2010 challenger - the STR5 - at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Valencia on Monday. The car features an almost identical livery to previous years, while the chassis takes its design cue from last year's car, including an extended engine cover and bevelled nose.

The rollout of this new chassis is an important achievement for the team, who this year have been required to bring the design department entirely in-house. The Italian outfit had until this season been riding on the coat tails of sister team Red Bull Racing.

The STR5 livery features stronger branding around the cockpit area, hopefully making it easier to distinguish from the Red Bull.
Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Chassis STR5-02 was presented at 09:05 GMT in Spain, where in front of the assembled media, drivers Sébastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari pulled the covers back on the new car.

Shortly after the unveiling, Buemi took to the track, but completed just 10 laps before suffering a gearbox problem. By the end of the day the team had managed a total of 18 laps, however the team's technical director, Giorgio Ascanelli is more than aware they could be in for a tough time this year.

Before even thinking about producing a car, we had to acquire the right tools to carry out these tasks and also hire the people who are to use these structures. Finding fifty people and putting them in an environment where they can do their job has been a tough task.

Team Principal, Franz Tost offered a more optimistic view stating that STR "Must aim to finish in the top eight in the Constructors’ Championship".

Sébastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari display their 2010 helmet designs for the assembled photographers.
Credit: Ker Robertson/Getty Images

Chief Designer, Ben Butler was keen to point out that the car's heritage is closely tied to the package they ended their 2009 campaign with:

The STR5 is definitely a case of evolution rather than revolution. We have taken a fantastic 2009 package as our starting point and we did not want to do too much with it, apart from changing and adapting it to take into consideration the regulation changes.

It is easy to say there is little change between the 2009 and 2010 cars, but there have been a lot of significant evolutions that we have had to put in place, primarily to ensure reliability, and which will hopefully prove to be competitive once the racing starts.

Buemi will get two days in the car before Alguersuari takes over on Wednesday.

The highly sculpted nose of the STR5.
Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

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