Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsToro Rosso

Sainz cautious over Tost's podium target

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Carlos Sainz is wary of team principal Franz Tost's aim of scoring a podium this season, saying it is "a big target".

Toro Rosso launched its 2016 livery on Tuesday morning at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with the STR11 having run for the first time last week. A switch from Renault to a year-old Ferrari power unit saw the car enjoy an encouraging debut and led Tost to target going one better than the team's 2015 best of fourth place this season.

GALLERY: Toro Rosso STR11

With Tost also setting Toro Rosso a target of finishing fifth in the constructors' championship, Sainz warns it will take special circumstances for a podium to be possible.

"For me it's a big target," Sainz told F1i. "At the end if you're fighting for P5 in the constructors' it means if nothing happens then at the end of the race you're P9 or P10 and that is really far from the podium. Really, really far.

"You need at least six drivers to not finish and not do a perfect race. So you need a crazy race. There's two or three crazy races a year, so in one of those three crazy races you need to make everything perfect. To make everything perfect is not easy at all so you need to put all of the circumstances together.

"I want - if the team wants to finish P5 constructors' championship - to be P9 every race and to be the one who extracts the maximum potential out of the car and you say 'Wow, there was nothing else I could do better in that qualifying or that race'."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.