Cologne, Tuesday: Ex-employees of the old Toyota Formula One team have said that they are astounded by recent reports from the Japanese car manufacturer, claiming that thousands of their cars will have to be recalled after throttle and brake problems.
Recently the company was forced to recall eight million units due to problems with the throttle being stuck open; now it is reported that their hybrid model, the Prius, is plagued with braking issues.
“We are amazed that the company is having such problems,” former technical director Mike Gascoyne, now working for Lotus, told reporters. “When we were working there, the major problem was that the throttle seemed to work too slowly, and the brakes were if anything too good – the cars were just slow everywhere.”
Though problems within the team, concerning acceleration and braking issues, were largely kept quiet, they did occasionally rise to public attention – such as in the last race of 2008, when Timo Glock completely failed to accelerate around the final corner.
“If anything this is an absolute reversal of the issues we were used to dealing with when we were still employed at Toyota,” Gascoyne, who left the team in 2006. His sentiments were confirmed by numerous other team members, most of whom were made redundant when the team withdrew from F1 at the end of 2009.
Most of the former Toyota team assets have been bought up by n0nexistent Serbian outfit Stefan GP, who hope to use them to give Ralf Schumacher the illusion that he is doing something useful in 2010. Whether the new team will continue “The Toyota Way” of promising much and delivering surprisingly little remains to be seen, though with Schumacher at the wheel, it seems likely.
