Scuderia Toro Rosso thus ends the year seventh in the Constructors’ championship, while Jev is 13th and Daniil is 15th in the Drivers’ classification. While Daniil was due to run a conventional two stopper, having had to start on the used Supersofts he had run in Q2 yesterday, we were going for a more aggressive three stopper with Jev: he started on new Softs, switched to another set on lap 13 and again on lap 30, finally fitting the Supersofts on lap 44, for a quick ten lap sprint to the end, but by this stage he was bit too far off the slower cars ahead and so it didn’t really work for him.

A very long season has now come to an end, a year that had plenty of controversy, with new rules, new power units and then today, the double points that actually had little effect on the outcome of the championship. It had some bad moments, with the grid going down to 18 cars and one cannot forget the terrible accident involving Jules Bianchi. However, one outstanding performance came from the entire Mercedes team, who took both titles, with Lewis Hamilton winning today to take his second world championship drivers’ crown. So congratulations must go to them.

For Scuderia Toro Rosso, the 2015 season will start on Tuesday, when we take part in the final two day test session, here at Yas Marina, with our new young driver Max Verstappen at the wheel for both days. It will give him his first real chance to work with his engineers in a less frenetic environment than in the handful of FP1 sessions he has driven this year. As our team principal Franz Tost said in today’s team press release, “the 2015 Melbourne Grand Prix is just around the corner:” how right he is as there are now only 110 days to the first day of free practice in Australia.