Gascoyne: We should have been third.

Toyota technical director Mike Gascoyne left Shanghai International with mixed feelings on Sunday evening, happy that Ralf Schumacher had put the revised TF105B on the podium, but regretting that the team had not been able to secure more similar results through the year.

The campaign had started promisingly for the Cologne-based team, with Jarno Trulli taking successive second places in Malaysia and Bahrain and third in Spain, but it wasn't until Hungary that the team returned to the top three, with Schumacher, and then had to wait until the final round to reappear on the podium. Had it been more consistent, Gascoyne reckons, Toyota could have beaten Ferrari to third place in the overall constructors' standings.

"We were fourth, but it should have been third," he told Reuters after trailing the Italian outfit by twelve points after China, "Without Indianapolis, and really off our own backs, we should have finished third. With four or five races to go, we were quick enough to finish third."

The team's 2005 haul of 88 points was more than three times as many as their total from its previous three years in the top flight, while the season also produced a first pole position and podium. However, there was just one thing missing from the CV, and Gascoyne knows it has to be added next season to justify the budget being thrown at the programme.

"We've got to start winning some races," he admitted, "If we'd have been lucky, a win was possible this year and it has to be possible next year. If [Fernando] Alonso had had an engine problem in a couple of races, it would have come this year. But I think we've proved that we know what we're doing, and we just have to make the same step again."

Gascoyne is happy to be working with the same drivers again next season - the first time that Toyota will have started a campaign season with the same line-up as it ended the last.

"Both of them picked up a lot of points, and third's a great result for the team," he noted, before pointing out that the pair never really clicked in the same events.

"Jarno got into one of those things where he finished a race well, so he went out in qualifying with a good slot, had a good qualifying and got a good result. Then, when Takuma Sato hit him [at Suzuka], he got into the reverse at the end of the year.

"Ralf was the other way around. He didn't have the heights of qualifying that Jarno had but, in the last few races, he did some very solid qualifying. He's a good racer once he gets the bit between the teeth. The one thing about Ralf is that once he gets a sniff of it, he's very consistent. Once the car was good and he needed to do a job, he did it very well."