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F1 : 2009 Toro Rosso STR4 - Technical Director - Giorgio Ascanelli

Source - Scuderia Toro Rosso

Monday, 09 March 2009

Ascanelli

It’s a common misconception that before the start of the season a big truck turns up in Faenza from Milton Keynes, its back door folds down and, hey presto, a fully built Toro Rosso car rolls out.

In fact, Scuderia Toro Rosso has far more control over its technical destiny, right from the design stage through to construction.

Technical Director Giorgio Ascanelli explains:
“Red Bull Technology does extremely significant work in defining the essential characteristics of the new car, its length, wheelbase, weight distribution, its basic metric characteristics. However, with any F1 car, the packaging revolves around an engine and peculiarities from the drivers and, as we run a different engine to our sister team, it involves a different fuel system and fuel tank. Therefore, ours is completely different to the Red Bull Racing car and is designed here by us."

“The same goes for the water and oil systems linked to the engine. Different engines have different heat rejection and different operating temperatures, with materials specified to different levels. Also, the tolerances, which you have to respect when building an engine, are tuned in such a way that an engine works at its best within a defined temperature range. This in itself conditions the radiators and also all of the internal aerodynamics. That then impacts on the aero side and this work is also done in Faenza."

“The engine mates to a gearbox via some fixings and a clutch. Here again the clutch installation is completely different between the two cars. In fact, the clutch itself is very different and the work of installing clutch and gearbox is also completely done in Faenza, involving a casing designed in Faenza and using completely different technology to the one Red Bull Technology provides to Red Bull Racing. The same goes for the oil and water radiators and the entire hydraulic and electronic systems."

“It’s going to be an interesting season. I think it’s good that the guys here in Faenza get the chance to control their own destiny in a way, but at the moment, we only have about a dozen people on the design side, so we’re a decade out in terms of manpower!”

Giorgio Ascanelli – Biography

From Ferrara, Italy, Giorgio has pretty much done it all in a motor sport career that dates back to 1985, when he worked as a calculation engineer at Ferrari. That was followed by a brief spell rallying with Abarth and then three years as Gerhard Berger’s race engineer with the Scuderia (the big red team, not Toro Rosso!)

He then moved to Benetton, engineering world champion Nelson Piquet before rejoining Berger at McLaren where he also engineered Ayrton Senna in 1993. Soon it was time to return to Ferrari, again working with Gerhard and also Jean Alesi.

Ascanelli then moved away from the race tracks and built up Maserati’s very successful sports car racing programme from scratch. But when you have had the F1 virus, it stays with you for life and Ascanelli returned to the Grand Prix scene to head up Scuderia Toro Rosso’s technical operation for the start of 2008. Giorgio lists tennis as one of his hobbies saying, “I can go from pre-game warm-up to total exhaustion without playing a single point!”

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