Sebastian Vettel took his first win with Toro Rosso back in 2008. It was a moment of incredible happiness both for the driver and the team, but it turned into a real headache soon after. As Toro Rosso, currently AlphaTauri, claimed the win with Vettel, rival teams stepped up to protest against them.
Franz Tost, the current team principal of the Red Bull-owned team, has recently opened up on this during the recently surfaced Beyond the Grid podcast. He said that all the teams came up to say,
“This is not the way Formula 1 can go in the future. They have to do this job in the future by themselves, no synergies anymore.”
Admittedly, the rival teams put forth their complaint that Toro Rosso were getting help and even excelling from their main team, Red Bull Racing [or being a copy of Red Bull]. Therefore, the FIA brought up rules to prevent this from happening in the future, where they had to make their own aerodynamic parts.
According to the regulations, Toro Rosso needed to make their own monocoque diffuser, front wing, plates, nose, floor, engine cover, and so on. Now, 15 years later, Red Bull and AlphaTauri are on a different path, on a whole different trajectory, but will soon be going in the same direction.
How would Red Bull and AlphaTauri be the same again?
At a time when Red Bull is excelling and becoming one of the most successful teams in F1, AlphaTauri is doing the opposite. Even in 2023, the Austrian team demolished its opponents, whereas their Italian counterparts languished at the bottom for most of the season.
Since the car development of the Faenza-based team is nothing but poor, this forced the AlphaTauri management to go down the Red Bull way, as in following their sister team’s successful sidepod, floor, and other aerodynamic parts.
However, Tost’s team will not be allowed to make a carbon copy of the RB-19 or its successor, but there are talks about having multiple parts common. This will be done in order to make AlphaTauri a bit more competitive and bring them into the mid-table fights.
The current situation of Tost’s team also ruins the reputation of the Red Bull fraternity for having two drastically different teams. Therefore, experts believe that the improvements made will not only boost them on track but also give them a raise commercially.
