As a young lad, Franz Tost’s big hero was Jochen Rindt: his bedroom walls were covered with posters of the Austrian ace and when it was dissertation time at school, Franz’s classmates would all groan, as they knew what was coming – another bloody eulogy to Rindt. Inevitably, Tost found himself behind the wheel, racing a Formula Ford. He was quick enough to win the 1983 Austrian FF Championship, but he felt he would not make it to the top as a driver so a degree in Sports Management from Innsbruck University was next on the agenda. This led to a job at the highly-rated Walter Lechner Racing School at the Zeltweg circuit.

From there Tost moved to a team management role with EUFRA Racing and at the end of 1993, he took the post of team manager with Willi Weber’s Formula 3 team. It was here that he crossed paths with Ralf Schumacher and Weber asked Tost to accompany the youngster to Japan. This led to looking after Ralf’s interests at Jordan and then Williams, prior to taking on the role of Operations Manager with BMW’s Formula 1 programme. From there, he took on the role of Team Principal with the newly formed Scuderia Toro Rosso in 2005.

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 2007. 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!”

This is the second Faenza era for Team Manager Fantuzzi, as he worked here with Minardi from 1998 to 2001 as a race engineer, before joining Scuderia Toro Rosso in 2006. In 2009, he took on a new role, relinquishing the job of General Manager to return to the race tracks as Team Manager.

Like all young boys living in Modena, he was infected with the racing virus at an early age and joined Ferrari as a mechanic when he was just 16-years-old. He spent 22 years with the Prancing Horse, most of that time working as an engineer on the test and race team. He also took a break from Formula One, moving to the United States to get involved with the company’s IMSA programme.

“When I was young, I used to go karting, but I did just enough to know that I was much too slow,” says Gianfranco. “I always preferred what goes on behind the scenes in racing and so, after race engineering at Minardi, I moved to the role of Logistics Manager with the Toyota F1 team.” However, a few years ago, he returned to his spiritual home and, as team manager, spends much of his time with his head buried in the F1 rule book.

When you compete in races known as “Grand Prix,” it’s useful to have someone in your team who understands what those two words mean, even if this is not our French Chief Engineer’s main role. Laurent Mekies is well qualified for the job, with a Masters degree in Automotive Engineering obtained in Paris, which included a final year at the UK’s Loughborough University, something of a hotbed for race engineers in Britain. Laurent’s entire working life has been spent trackside, first with a Formula 3 team, before eventually tasting F1 with the Arrows team in 2001. A year later he joined Minardi as a race engineer and has been in Faenza ever since, taking on the role of Chief Engineer when Scuderia Toro Rosso was born.