The Toyota Formula One team were one of the biggest disappointments of the season opening Australian Grand Prix last Sunday, the Japanese squad failing to live up pre-season expectations. Atlas F1's Karl Ludvigsen looks at the way Toyota handled their dismal weekend

Do you suppose Toyota planned it that way? They got pretty darn good coverage from the Australian Grand Prix. The German-built Japanese cars were picked up often by the cameras around the Melbourne track. Both of them were spotted many times - as they were lapped. In fact, just to add extra value, the Toyotas were lapped twice by the winning Ferraris. Toyota can't say they didn't get value from Melbourne!

Okay, folks, just kidding. Toyota's performance in Australia must rank as the most ignominious in their Grand Prix career to date. And just to add to their distress, the Japanese company nipping at the heels of the Big Guys at Melbourne was not Toyota but Honda, in partnership with BAR, running strongly both in qualifying and the race and snagging sixth and ninth places, collecting valuable points. This will be deeply galling to all at Toyota City.

Australia was an appalling, humbling display for one of the three richest teams in Formula One. Even worse, it contrasted dramatically with Toyota's publicly expressed goals for the season. "I hope that we can make a big leap forward this year," said Tsutomu Tomita, Toyota team principal, before the race, "to challenge for points at every race, starting this weekend in Melbourne." One Grand Prix out of 18 gone, Tomita-san, and that goal has already been blown.

That leaves Toyota with only one more goal to achieve in 2004. "I also believe we can score our first-ever podium finish," Tomita said before the start of the season. To judge by his team's performance in Melbourne, this is a forlorn expectation.

How could a team so delude itself? What basis did Toyota have for forecasting that they would be a points-challenger and podium-grabber in 2004? It's hard to see the justification in their testing times. They tested at Valencia most consistently in the pre-season. They did clock times there that were better than Renault's through January of this year, but in February Toyota were clearly off the pace set by McLaren, Williams, Jaguar and BAR.

Even more revealing were the Imola tests in February. That's where Ferrari showed for the first time that they had performance to burn. There, the best Toyota times were well down on those set by Ferrari, Renault, McLaren, Williams and even Sauber, and only quicker than Jordan and Minardi. This was hardly the stuff of legend, scarcely a basis for forecasting that Toyota would brush aside the big teams and grab points from the start of the season.

Perhaps they were banking on their rivals failing to get their reliability act together on the new one-engine rule. "On a positive note," said Mike Gascoyne after Melbourne, "the reliability of the car was excellent and we got both cars to the finish." Yes, and in 12th and 13th places behind a Sauber and a Jaguar and ahead of a lonely Jordan. Great, the cars are reliable, but they are bog slow.

Gascoyne said that the race was "very disappointing with both drivers suffering from a general lack of grip from the tyres. We experienced no particular problems with the balance of the car, just a lack of grip throughout the race." It sounded like he was blaming the tyres, and it's true that the conditions didn't suit the Michelins, but some other people wearing them avoided the ignominy of being lapped even once.

Frankly I think it's outrageous that Toyota is putting Gascoyne up as their spokesman for the team. He's listed as "Technical Director Chassis", which hardly makes him the man to have to defend the TF104's dismal performance. He had nothing at all to do with creating it. Gascoyne should be back at Cologne, beavering away on the 2005 car while Gustav Brunner makes the best fist he can of the car he designed for 2004. It's now the fashionable thing to rubbish Brunner, and it's certainly true that he was no longer a cutting-edge creator when Toyota hired him, but he was Toyota's man and they should stand behind him and their decision to engage him.

Team principal Tomita should be speaking for Toyota, not Gascoyne. If he's too shy to be publicly quoted, they should find somebody who's willing to take responsibility for the team's bad days as well as their good one. John Howett is the team's president, Toshiu Kurusu vice-president, Norbert Kreyer is general manager and Keizo Takahashi is the technical coordinator. Any one of these would be better placed to be a team spokesperson than Gascoyne.

What worries me the most is that Tomita and company may have been telling their Toyota superiors that they expected to be in a points-scoring position - telling them, in other words, what they thought they wanted to hear. It's easily enough done. The problem is that people who do that soon lose credibility with the home office. Loss of trust on the part of main-company management is the worst thing that can happen to a remotely located racing team. Tomita-san has to start telling it like it is, both internally and publicly, or risk the future of the team that he and Ove Andersson worked so hard to establish.

As I've said before, I'm not convinced about Toyota's long-term level of commitment. At the beginning of 2002, I made this comment about the prospects for the Grand Prix team:

"Only one thing worries me. Toyota never won Le Mans. As long ago as 1992 Toyota was second at Le Mans. In 1993 it was fourth, and in 1994 it was second again. In 1998 it placed ninth at Le Mans and in 1999 it was second once more. Then Toyota gave up. Instead of pressing on to win the race in which it had invested so much time, energy and money, it quit. This is not a good sign. This suggests to me that Toyota was racing at Le Mans because it thought that it was a good thing to do from a public relations standpoint, not because it thought that winning was important."

Unless the team starts straight-talking with the owners and the public, admitting faults and realistically assessing their prospects, Toyota's Grand Prix program could go down that very same drain.

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About the author:
Long time columnist at Atlas F1, Karl Ludvigsen is an award-winning author and historian who managed racing programs for Fiat in America in the late 1970s and Ford of Europe in the early 1980s. He is the author of numerous award winning books about about racing drivers, classic racing cars and engines, all of which draw extensively on the many images in his Ludvigsen Library in Suffolk, England.