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designer (his classics include the Ducati 916 and MV Agusta F4) lives and works in nearby San Marino; Valentino Rossi hails from Urbino, an 80-mile blast (flatout, presumably) from Faenza; Maserati, like Ducati, calls Bologna home. There’s so much motorsport fever in these parts, it’s surely infectious. So it’s not too much of a surprise to find a Formula One factory in a town otherwise content to rest in the shadows of its limelight cousins. That factory houses Scuderia Toro Rosso, the junior squadron of Red Bull’s F1 adventure (big-brother Red Bull Racing is based in Milton Keynes, England). And while it might appear a hick-from-the-sticks compared to its city-slicker relative, currently in the thick of the fight for the F1 world championship titles, Toro Rosso has a proud F1 past of its own. It can trace its roots back to a tiny, 20-man team that decided to go Grand Prix racing as Minardi in 1985, but then hit the big time spectacularly in 2008, when a certain young German you might have heard of – Sebastian Vettel – drove one of its cars to victory. It was a stunning, memorable win – Vettel’s first, Toro Rosso’s first – and it came of all places, at Monza, hallowed home of the Italian Grand Prix. It was a giddy moment for all in the team, for all, indeed, in a sport that has a fine appetite for fairy tales. But it wasn’t, lest anyone tell you otherwise, a freak victory or a lucky result on a crazy day. No, Toro Rosso and Vettel won the race with a fast car, brilliantly driven and expertly run by the tightest-knit bunch of F1 troops you’ll ever find. Formula One for these boys is family, not just work. Many of the Faenza factory staff go home for lunch, because they live here, have grown up here. When Toro Rosso does well, this quiet town quietly celebrates – although that fabled Monza win prompted the ringing of the town-centre church bells in a manner reserved normally only for Ferrari in its Maranello home parish. When they do less well, they’re allowed to get on with their business and work away at success until it comes, as everyone in the team believes it eventually will. A family affair then, but a somewhat unusual one, because it has an Austrian ‘father’ in one Franz Tost. A native of Trins, near Innsbruck in the Austrian Tyrol, Tost joined Toro Rosso in November 2005 after six years with BMW, where he jointly ran the team’s Formula One activities. Now in a team 72
whose nationality is 75 per cent Italian, but whose mentality is nearer 95 per cent Italian, he stands out as something of an enigma: a lean, upright, precise man whose intelligent intensity is apparent from first meeting. Cultural stereotypes might cast him more readily at a team such as Switzerland’s Sauber, or certainly with his former Bavarian employers. It’s hard, for example, to picture Tost bursting into an impromptu rendition of Nessun Dorma, whereas Toro Rosso’s technical chief, Giorgio Ascanelli, looks as if he might pass his occasional spare Sunday as lead tenor with the Faenza Operatic Society. As with the team itself, however, it pays to look harder at the 54-year-old Mr Tost. He is remarkably friendly, for starters, gracious and generous with his
“Toro rosso can trace its roots back to a 20-man team that decided to go Grand Prix racing as Minardi in 1985, but then hit the big time at Monza in 2008” time (within, you suspect, a clearly defined window reserved for media guests) and refreshingly devoid of ego for one whose Formula One team-boss peers are most often consumed by this single, dominant characteristic. And it quickly emerges that whatever superficial differences there might be between this boss and those he’s charged to lead, they are united by something far more important: passion. Tost, like many of his kind, is a former racing driver. He competed in his younger days in both Formula Ford and Formula 3, before studying sports science and moving into team management at Austria’s Walter Lechner Racing School. From there it was Formula 3, where he worked closely with Ralf Schumacher. The two were later reunited in F1 when Ralf drove for Williams-BMW and Tost was BMW’s track ops manager. It was here, too, that Tost crossed paths with compatriot and multiple Grand Prix winner Gerhard Berger, who, six years later, would become part-owner of Scuderia Toro Rosso. Racing, it’s clear, is in Tost’s blood, just as it’s a DNA strand
in those born within sniffing distance of the Toro Rosso factory floor. A racer’s precision is evident in his movements: he walks fast and straight, with precise economy of motion. His desk and office continue the theme: this is not a man to fumble for a chewed pencil and scribble notes on a rumpled Post-it that will then be slapped precariously onto a laptop. No – paperwork is aligned with slide-rule perfection against the lines of his desk. A pen is set square against the paper. His laptop is open and you might guess that its angle of aperture has been optimised at 73 degrees from the horizontal. He is, in short, co-ordinated, as befits a man whose particular expertise is making things happen with minimum fuss, maximum effectiveness. But this makes Tost sound austere, which emphatically he is not. When he talks, his eyes betray the excitement that’s the hallmark of any true enthusiast and as The Red Bulletin’s photographer starts his work, he collapses into giggles when he quips: “I must try to get my hair straight.” Tost is quite shiny-domed and he’s not shy of this joke against his defunct follicles. He is also, for a man with no trace of fat on his frame, surprisingly partial to a slice of Sachertorte or Black Forest gateau. We digress. On Tost’s watch, Toro Rosso have undergone something of a transformation from battling underdogs – happy simply to be part of the great Formula One travelling circus, scraping a point here and there, surviving – to something altogether more serious. Staff numbers have trebled from 80 to 257 (the precise figure known, and shared, by Tost) and hefty sums have been spent on the factory’s manufacturing capabilities, in a push to take it from tail-end to midfield and offer junior Red Bull drivers a chance to break through to superstardom, just like Vettel. The Monza day of days was, Tost admits, “amazing”. But in a paternal, team-leader-ish way, he’s quick to extrapolate the value of simply winning into something of wider, more lasting, worth. “It was an amazing day for the complete team,” he reflects, “and very important for motivation because it showed that we are also able to win. It proved that if we do everything right we can beat anyone and that is hugely important for the future. You can tell a person you are good and that you will do a good job, but between telling and doing there’s a difference.” Wonderful as that triumph was to witness (and, for