Toro Rosso, the development team for Formula One’s Red Bull Racing, has a beautiful race car these days despite it hanging around out of sight near the back of the field most of the time. But looks can be deceiving, and this poor, pretty soul has the plague of a Honda F1 engine in it this year.
Smile on the outside to hide the pain on the inside, until the engine blows your cover, Toro Rosso.
This will be Toro Rosso’s first season since dropping a deal with F1’s second-worst engine supplier, Renault, which Honda vowed last year to surpass. That didn’t happen, and other teams are so terrified of the engine that Sauber’s new team principal ended the team’s Honda deal within his first hour in charge.
The car features the mandatory new halo, a safety bar above the cockpit that the Mercedes team claims can hold the weight of a double-decker bus. It blends well and looks less like a flip flop when it matches the color of the race car, instead of being solid black. It also doesn’t mess up the sightline from the car as much as we expected, but a bar in the middle of the view is still a sight to get used to.
Should Honda’s turbocharged 1.6-liter hybrid V6 turn on and last more than a few laps, Toro Rosso claims the car will rev to 15,000 RPM. The car weighs right at 1,616 pounds, which is the new minimum weight for F1 cars after the addition of the halo. All in all, it’s a good-looking vehicle that, again, we probably won’t see much of this year. Mercedes and Ferrari tend to hog all of the attention.
At least with the Honda power unit, it’ll probably get some television coverage when the engine gives out... again, and again, and again.