The award for most contradictory statements in the off season goes to Jarno Trulli this year - unsurprisingly. Throughout testing, his view of the Toyota TF108's performance has ranged from despair to wild optimism, easily beating Nick Heidfeld's caution about and occasional hope for the BMW F1.08. In his final bid for the crown, Jarno is now reported to have said the following in almost the same breath:
"We could be the big surprise of the year."
"We are a good three tenths behind the BMW Sauber team, but that does not mean that we are the fourth power."
Maybe he meant that the big surprise would be that the team would slip even further down the grid!
Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock
In contrast, Timo Glock's comments have been uniformly low key and it is clear that he does not expect the car to be competitive with the group chasing Ferrari and McLaren. Looking at the testing times, it is fairly obvious where this pessimism originates - apart from one day in Barcelona when the Toyota topped the testing times, it has been a long way off the pace.
Which leaves us guessing when it comes to slotting Toyota into our pre-season predictions. It would be easy to assume that the team's results will be roughly equivalent to last year's tale of inconsistency and under-performance, were it not for that final day in Barcelona. Was that evidence of sand-bagging? Or yet another example of Toyota getting it right sometimes by sheer chance?
My inability to believe that such a well-funded outfit could get everything so hopelessly wrong two years in a row leads me to suspect that the first option may be correct. And then I remember how Honda seem to be achieving exactly that feat and I am left in confusion again. It's back to guessing and my bet has to be that Jarno and Glock will be fighting with Renault for the last point or two in each race (which says something about where I think Renault will be).
The drivers are quite difficult to predict too. We all know Jarno and his impossibly quick qualifying times followed by uninspired race performances. Timo Glock is said to be the exact opposite - not a great qualifier but a demon in the race. That does not augur well for Timo, unless the loss of traction control makes passing a bit easier. Just ask Wurz and Coulthard how hard it is to score after qualifying poorly. It seems likely that Jarno will finish higher up the order on most occasions and we will be left wondering how well Timo might have done if only he had managed to get a bit higher on the grid.
There remains a frustrating sense of mystery over the team's prospects, however. I cannot shake the feeling that Jarno's most accurate statement was his suggestion that Toyota could be the surprise of the season. It would not be the first time that a team suddenly came good once the season commenced and our expectations of Toyota are now so low that any improvement will seem almost magical. If you're looking for a dark horse amongst the teams, Toyota is probably the one.