Tost: Unreliability cost Toro Rosso “too many points”

Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost claims his squad has “lost too many points” due to unreliability over the first half of the season.

Despite lining up an all-rookie duo this year, the Faenza-based outfit entered its 2015 campaign targeting an ambitious fifth in the Constructors’ championship. At the midway point, Toro Rosso is P7 and within striking range of its pre-season goal thanks to strong performances from Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen in the competitive STR10.

But Tost feels his team would rank higher if it did not suffer several retirements.

“We do have a good car, we have two fast drivers and we have a team that is doing a reasonable job but our reliability is simply not good enough,” Tost told the official Formula One website.

“Max’s [fourth-place] result in Budapest was fantastic, but we should not forget that we’ve had ten races so far and that should ideally mean that we’ve seen the chequered flag 20 times. But we’ve only seen it eleven times.

“That is not a good enough percentage. You cannot expect to talk from a successful operation if you do not finish a race nine times. We are seventh in the constructors championship because we simply lost too many points.”

Although Toro Rosso fell foul of power unit partner Renault’s poor reliability on several occasions, Tost admits the team is not beyond reproach either, as highlighted by Sainz’ retirement at Budapest because of a broken hose clip.

“Many times we’ve had problems with the drive train, but not only that. The team has also made mistakes. The race in Silverstone saw a mechanical failure on the car, and that one went on us!

“So we have to improve our processes on the operation side. We have to work with more discipline - and if we get that right we will eventually score more points.”

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