F1: 'Unluckiest team' Toro Rosso aims for top five

Toro Rosso is targeting a top-five finish in the constructors' championship after passing the mandatory crash tests with its 2017 car.

The Red Bull junior team aimed to break into the top five for the past few seasons, but was hampered by the need to develop young drivers and an unstable engine situation. After two years with Renault power units under the V6 regulations, Toro Rosso ran a 2015 Ferrari engine last year before announcing it will return to Renault for this season.

Technical director James Key says the pieces are now in place to finally deliver on that promise, with the team working on the weaknesses it has had operationally.

"The last couple of years we've wanted to be a top-five team and for various reasons we've failed to achieve that, to be honest," Key told RACER. "I think some of it has definitely been in our control, some of it has been out of our control.

"We've been probably the unluckiest team on the grid with the engine situation since the power units came in [in 2014] because we've never had a strong, well-developed power unit. That's no disrespect to Renault but we all know they had issues for the first couple of years but they really did a great job last year and I think they're continuing to do a good job now.

"Of course we had a year-old power unit last year which didn't develop at all and was well behind by the second half of the season so I think that's definitely worked against us the last three years. Equally we haven't always brought home the number of points we should or could have done as a team either. That's something that we're trying to figure out why now. Some of it is like reliability occasionally, but there's other things too that we need to improve on.

"Our targets haven't changed; we'd like to be a top-five team. I think we've had the chassis to do it, we just haven't had all of the ingredients and I'm hoping we can tick all of the boxes for 2017."

Key also confirmed the 2017 car has now passed all of its crash tests ahead of pre-season testing and did so at the first attempt despite the amount of changes made to the chassis compared to last year.

"Yeah, we passed everything first time, which is really good so the guys have done a fantastic job with that and it means we're free to get on with it now without having to worry about the impact tests anymore.

"We had a few bits and pieces [that were challenging]. We've homologated everything on the car again. There are some things you can occasionally carry over but we've actually done more than normal and that's all gone really well. We have a new front impact test this year which is a slightly more pragmatic way of doing it in that it doesn't require the chassis to be tested at the same time as the nose. That wasn't a concern but it was an unknown, and I think the team dealt with that very well. So that became fairly straightforward.

"The nose itself, with the 2017 regs it's slightly easier to pass because the geometry needs to be a bit longer so it's less of a challenge perhaps than recent years. The rear impact structure has a few interesting features on it which made that slightly more difficult than perhaps it could be but again the guys dealt with it very well and we passed OK."