Existing as a proving ground for Red Bull’s young drivers, Toro Rosso has seen plenty of talent pass through its door since the team was founded in 2006. The team was renamed as AlphaTauri ahead of the 2020 season.
| Drivers’ Championships | 0 |
| Constructors’ Championships | 0 |
| First F1 Appearance | 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix |
| Wins | 2 |
| Poles | 1 |
Toro Rosso came into being in 2006 after Red Bull bought the Minardi team. Minardi had raced in Formula One since 1985, starting 340 Grands Prix and scoring 38 points over their time in the sport. Toro Rosso – Italian for Red Bull – exist as proving ground for drivers from Red Bull’s young driver programme. The team have seen plenty of talent pass through since its inception, with varying degrees of success. The team are based in Faenza, in northern Italy.
Despite using the previous year’s Red Bull car, in their maiden season Toro Rosso gave Red Bull a run for their money. Gerhard Berger became the Team Principal as Vitantonio Liuzzi scored the team’s first points. In 2007, original driver Scott Speed was dropped in favour of Sebastian Vettel after he impressed as a stand-in driver at BMW Sauber. China was a highlight of the year, as Vettel finished fourth and Liuzzi came home in sixth. For 2008, another Sebastien joined the team – Champ Car Champion Sebastien Bourdais. Bourdais scored points on his debut, though the German had the measure of the Frenchman, and Vettel scored a pole and victory on an unforgettable weekend at Monza. The team became regular points scorers on their way to sixth in the Constructors’ Championship, beating Red Bull in the standings. Vettel scored 35 of the team’s 39 points. Gerhard Berger sold his stake in the team back to Red Bull and Franz Tost became the new Team Principal for 2009. A new driver line-up followed as Vettel moved up to the main Red Bull team. He was replaced by yet another Sebastien, as Buemi became the first Swiss driver in F1 since 1995. It was a disappointing season for Toro Rosso. They finished last in the championship, and Bourdais was replaced mid-season by Jaime Alguersuari.
The team became a constructor in their own right, as they gained independence from Red Bull in 2010. Maintaining the previous season’s driver line-up, the team moved up to ninth in the championship, but ahead only of the three new teams. They moved up another position to eighth in 2011 before taking an all new driver line-up in 2012. At the hands of Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Éric Vergne, the team scored 26 points, slipping back down the order to ninth overall. The car lacked pace in the early part of the season, but was regularly scoring points in the latter half of the year. The Italian team moved back up to eighth in 2013, with a sixth place finish in Canada for Vergne being the team’s best result. It was Ricciardo, though, who was chosen to replace Vettel at the main Red Bull team, and Vergne continued with Toro Rosso alongside GP3 champion Daniil Kvyat for the 2014 season.
As they switched to Ferrari to Renault power at the start of the hybrid era, the team found themselves scoring points at half of the rounds in the season, with Vergne’s sixth place in Singapore their best result. Kvyat was promoted to Red Bull for 2015, while Vergne was dropped from the Italian team, making way for Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen. Verstappen was given his first F1 outing during practice for the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix where he became the youngest ever driver to partake in a session during an F1 weekend.
Reliability issues hampered the team throughout the 2015 season, but the talent of their new driver line-up – the youngest in their history – shone through. After finishing seventh in the overall standings, the team kept the same driver line-up for the first four rounds of the 2016 season, before Red Bull snatched Verstappen, handing Kvyat back to the team after a spate of disappointing performances. Kvyat mustered up just four points from the next sixteen rounds, while Sainz took 42. The team finished seventh overall once again.
It was another year of mixing up driver line-ups for Toro Rosso in 2017. Starting the season with Kvyat and Sainz, the team ended with Pierre Gasly and Brendon Hartley, as Kvyat was dropped from the Red Bull driver programme, and Sainz moved to Renault. Before he left, Sainz scored the best result of his career – a fourth place in Singapore – the team’s best result since 2008. Despite their new drivers facing terrible reliability issues in the final races of the season, the team managed to hold on to seventh for the fourth season in a row. Ironically, Kvyat, on his one-off return in America, scored the team’s only point from the last six rounds.
Toro Rosso had a new engine partner for 2018 – Honda. Hartley and Gasly remained with the team, as they slipped to ninth in the Constructors’ Championship. Despite the slip in championship position, the performance of the car was enough to convince the senior Red Bull team to switch to the Japanese manufacturer for 2019. There were a number of high points for Toro Rosso throughout the season, including Gasly’s fourth place at the Bahrain Grand Prix and an impressive qualifying result at Suzuka, Honda’s home track. Meanwhile, collisions between team-mates cost the team at the Chinese Grand Prix, while a near-miss between the pair in qualifying for the Azerbaijan race could have had very dramatic results.
TORO ROSSO IN 2019
Toro Rosso will become AlphaTauri in 2020 – but before the name vacated the sport, the team enjoyed their most successful season. For the second time in their history, they finished sixth in the championship, scoring a record 85 points.
It was another year of changing line-ups for the team, who welcomed back Daniil Kvyat at the start of the season, and welcomed back Pierre Gasly after the summer break, as rookie Alex Albon was sent to the senior team.
For the first time since 2008, Toro Rosso finished on the podium and, for the first time ever, they took two podium finishes in a year. Those two podium finishes came thanks to Daniil Kvyat, who finished third in Germany, and Pierre Gasly, who stormed home to second in Brazil. Both were a result of some good fortune, but ultimately the team were in the right place when it mattered.
In their second year with Honda power, Toro Rosso proved to have a reliable machine and completed the third most laps of any team over the season. Their only DNF this year through mechanical failure was an oil leak for Kvyat in Italy. Kvyat retired with collision damage in China and Azerbaijan, as did Albon in Canada. Along with McLaren, Toro Rosso were regularly the most improved team since 2018, lapping over a second faster than they did in the previous season at most circuits. Read more: Toro Rosso’s 2019 F1 Season In Stats.
ALPHATAURI IN 2020
The Red Bull junior team enjoyed a successful campaign in their first year under their new AlphaTauri name. The team scored 107 points this season – the most in their entire history dating back to their Minardi origins. Despite this, AlphaTauri finished one position below where Toro Rosso finished in the 2019 Constructors’ Championship. 2020 marked the fifth time in the last seven seasons that the team have ended the season in seventh place.
The highlight of AlphaTauri’s year was Pierre Gasly’s victory in the Italian Grand Prix. It was the team’s second win; their first since Sebastian Vettel won the Italian Grand Prix twelve years previously. AlphaTauri scored in all but two races this year, and enjoyed a streak of ten successive races with at least one car finishing in a points-paying position – the longest such streak in the team’s entire history. Read more: AlphaTauri’s 2020 F1 Season In Stats.
While Gasly remains with AlphaTauri for 2021, Daniil Kvyat will be replaced by rookie Yuki Tsunoda. Tsunoda finished third in the F2 championship in 2020, recording three race wins. Will the team be able to continue their impressive run of form with their new line-up?
ALPHATAURI’S RECENT F1 HISTORY
| Year | Championship Position | Wins | Poles | Drivers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 9th (13 points) | 0 | 0 | Sébastien Buemi, Jaime Alguersuari |
| 2011 | 8th (41 points) | 0 | 0 | Sébastien Buemi, Jaime Alguersuari |
| 2012 | 9th (26 points) | 0 | 0 | Daniel Ricciardo, Jean-Éric Vergne |
| 2013 | 8th (33 points) | 0 | 0 | Daniel Ricciardo, Jean-Éric Vergne |
| 2014 | 7th (30 points) | 0 | 0 | Jean-Éric Vergne, Daniil Kvyat |
| 2015 | 7th (67 points) | 0 | 0 | Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz |
| 2016 | 7th (63 points) | 0 | 0 | Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz, Daniil Kvyat |
| 2017 | 7th (53 points) | 0 | 0 | Daniil Kvyat, Carlos Sainz, Pierre Gasly, Brendon Hartley |
| 2018 | 9th (33 points) | 0 | 0 | Pierre Gasly, Brendon Hartley |
| 2019 | 6th (85 points) | 0 | 0 | Daniil Kvyat, Alex Albon, Pierre Gasly |
| 2020 | 7th (107 points) | 1 | 0 | Daniil Kvyat, Pierre Gasly |