Why can’t Toyota win? So asks “Colenzo” in the BBC Motorsport forum and he then goes on to put the blame on a lack of expertise amongst the team’s personnel. Which may have something to do with it, although I have a lot of respect for their senior chassis manager, Pascal Vasselon.

Toyota have been involved in F1 for several years now and the combined experience and knowledge of the team should be as extensive as Honda’s or BMW’s, for instance. Yet still they fail to convince.

Money is not the problem; the budget is supposed to be one of the largest in F1 and rumor has it that Ralf Schumacher is now one of the best paid drivers. So what is Toyota doing wrong?

The answer may lie in the very fact that Ralf drives for them. Not that he is the root cause of their failures but more that his continued presence, and Trulli’s for that matter, indicates a certain lack of imagination in the team’s management. After a flurry of driver changes when they entered F1 (and they sacked some pretty good ones), Toyota has inexplicably settled for their present driver line-up.

Ralf has always benefited from the secondhand aura of his elder brother; at any moment, we still expect that the Schumacher magic will blossom in him and he will prove unstoppable. The trouble is, it hasn’t happened and I doubt now that it ever will. Ralf has driven for some very good teams in his career and yet his results have been uniformly disappointing. Yes, we have blamed car failures, bad luck and too high expectations for his performances but, in fact, he has been given far more decent chances than most drivers get. If his name wasn’t Schumacher, I think he would be driving for one of the lesser teams by now.

And then there is Jarno Trulli, famously the qualifying specialist. How he must hate that title by now! It does nothing but put a huge question mark over his race performances and we forget the times when he does well. The truth is that Jarno is inconsistent – sometimes he is brilliant but, more often, he is merely competent. And his recent demonstration that he is not a team player also raises doubts over his suitability for Toyota.

So why is the Japanese giant sticking with their drivers? I can only put it down to an unwillingness to try something new. This would fit with the ethos of the company too, their faith in tried and tested technology having won the road cars a reputation for reliability but also leading us to look elsewhere for innovation and invention.

Consider the drivers that have been available this year. Mark Webber would have been a good choice, a driver of undoubted speed and with that Australian grit and determination that Toyota so desperately lack. Or the team could have gone looking amongst the horde of young drivers clamoring to get into F1. With their budget, the Toyota execs could easily have bought themselves a Vettel or a Paffett.

But no, Toyota stick with what they know. And that attitude is bound to affect such things as car design and race strategy. For the moment, F1 is still an arena where “he who dares, wins” and Toyota are paying the price of their conservatism.

Look at the chances other teams take. For the sake of a few tenths of a second off lap times, Ferrari were willing to risk their wheel inserts being banned; Renault did the same with the mass dampers. One team got what they wanted, the other didn’t – but both tried. When was the last time you heard of a Toyota tweak that came under suspicion from the FIA? It’s just not their style; they wait until other teams have had an improvement accepted and then they stick it on their cars. Note the bristling “ears” on the Toyota’s nose; no-one seems to know what they achieve but Ferrari has them and so does Renault – Toyota must have them too.

It’s not the way to win championships. To do that, you have to be prepared to try new ideas and take a few risks. Throwing money at the problem is never enough.

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I begin to wonder what the Toro Rosso bosses think they are playing at. To keep contracted drivers in suspense while they try out everyone else who looks as if he could hold a steering wheel has to be bad policy at the least. It was just this kind of dithering that led to Alonso leaving Renault for McLaren.

Of course, I realize that Sebastien Bourdais, the most recent to have a test with the team, is not really in the frame; he has stated repeatedly that he will drive for Newman/Haas in Champ Cars next year. But what purpose is served by letting STR’s existing drivers wait until the last moment to find out whether their contracts will be honored? If nothing else, it shows that the team does not have full confidence in their choice of drivers.

That has to have an effect on Scott Speed and Vitantonio Liuzzi. To know that their bosses are looking for someone better must erode their confidence and does nothing for relationships within the team. I can understand Spyker’s delay in filling their second seat – Tiago Monteiro did not exactly set the world alight in 2006, after all. But Toro Rosso’s indecision looks completely unnecessary.

Both Liuzzi and Speed showed great promise this season. It is hard to evaluate them without a known-quantity driver alongside but they seemed to get the best out of a car that was not expected to perform as well as it did. Since there are no obvious budding Michael Schumachers out there, the best option for the Scuderia would be to confirm their drivers and get down to preparation for next year.

I don’t think that Gerhard Berger is the problem. He has hinted often enough that there will be no surprises in the driver line-up. It seems to be Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull and Toro Rosso boss, who is being slow to make up his mind. I guess when you’re one of the richest people in the world, you don’t give a schitz how a couple of lowly F1 drivers feel.

Bernd Schneider, one of the fastest men in the DTM (German Touring Cars), is of the opinion that Gary Paffett, not Pedro de la Rosa, should have replaced Montoya in the McLaren team this year. Since Schneider has raced against Gary (and lost the DTM championship to him), he should know.

But who is this guy Paffett? Admitting to my somewhat hazy knowledge of the subject, I looked him up in the Wikipedia. And it turns out that the guy has a record that outshines even Lewis Hamilton’s. It seems whichever form of racing he entered, he would be champion sooner or later.

So Schneider may have a point, although it is certainly moot at this stage; there is no way we can change what actually happened. The consolation prize is that McLaren have taken him on for another year as a test driver and, from there, he could perhaps do a “Kubica” and force his way into F1 by sheer ability.

Whatever happens, Paffett must join the list of those new drivers with outstanding potential who are about to break into F1. There seems to be a long line of them eager for the next veteran to vacate his seat. I have even read articles in which it was suggested that the older drivers should get out and let the young ones have a go.

It makes me wonder whether the sport is becoming so competitive and demanding that drivers become worn out by their thirties. Decades ago a driver could continue to race well into his forties; indeed, Fangio was forty when he won his first World Championship. Slowly the age of retirement has come down and Michael Schumacher has set it now at 37.

It is interesting too that both Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen have hinted that they will not continue racing in F1 for many more years. Although they did not give their reasons, it seems likely that the pressures of the sport have become so great that very few can stand them for more than ten years or so.

We know that the physical demands have increased almost to the limit of human endurance. Many of the champions of the past would find their neck muscles inadequate to the task of winning today, for instance. But there are other stresses that a driver has to deal with now as well, the constant probing by the press, the attendance at functions for the sponsors, availability for testing the cars in between races; the modern driver gets little respite from his job.

Add to these demands the apparently inexhaustible supply of talented, ambitious youngsters streaming up from the lower formulae and one can see that the old soldiers of F1 have an enormous (and very often thankless) task to retain their seats. Even Mark Webber, who has been driving in F1 for only four years, is feeling the pressure.

It looks as though the sport is becoming a relentless machine that consumes drivers and then spits them out once they have served their very short time. In the future it may be that drivers will enter very young, as they turn twenty or twenty-one, give of their best for no more than a decade, and then disappear by the time they hit thirty.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I am all for new guys being given the chance to show how good they are. We will just have to get used to seeing new faces more often, I guess.

With McLaren’s announcement of Hamilton’s promotion to second race driver for the coming season, it looks as though there is only one seat left to be filled in F1: the second Spyker drive. That is assuming that Gerhard Berger is telling us the whole truth when he says there will be no changes at Toro Rosso for 2007 – the official announcement has yet to be made.

My bet is that Tiago Monteiro will get the Spyker drive. The team know him and none of the other drivers have been outstanding in their tests for the team. A threat of sorts came from Christian Klien but he has now been confirmed as a Honda test driver so that takes him out of the equation.

The teams that are sticking with their drivers for next year are Toyota, Honda, Spyker and, if you count the last few races of 2006, BMW Sauber. These are the ones that know exactly what they can expect from their drivers, have already established a working relationship with them and are satisfied with their choice. And that should give them a slight advantage over other teams that are still settling down after changes and learning how to get the best from their new drivers.

Or so it would seem. In fact, we all know that Spyker will not be challenging for race wins so any advantage they have will make little difference to the leaders. And Toyota’s choice seems typically conservative to me, a driver pairing that has already shown itself to be subject to some strain, with Ralph tending to underperform and Jarno more interested in his own career than in the success of the team. This is one team that could have done with a good shake-up on the driver front; I’d have sacked them both and looked for a good veteran and a promising youngster.

But that is not Toyota’s way. The reputation for reliability of their road cars is founded upon their philosophy that nothing new goes on the car until it has been tried and tested to the point of boredom. And this seems to be spilling over into the race team; they are not known for their introduction of fresh and innovative new designs in F1.

Which may go a long way to explaining their failure to deliver on the success we expect from a big manufacturer in the sport. Had they decided to go with a more radical driver line-up for 2007, their chances would be better, I think.

The other two unchanged teams, Honda and BMW, are the bright hopes for the future, of course. Both of them are looking very good, they have potentially exciting drivers and the ambition and ingenuity to succeed. My only doubt comes from BMW’s caution when it comes to their prospects for next season; they are low key on this and clearly do not expect to be challenging for a championship just yet.

That may be realistic but it also indicates a certain surprise at their progress so far. They are ahead of schedule and seem a little unsure of themselves as a result. And one thing we do know: any team that is going to win the championship must be absolutely convinced that they can do it.

Things are very different at Honda. They expected to be in amongst the leaders in 2006 and their disappointment at their results in the first half of the year showed in changes in personnel and rumblings from upper management. The fact that they did turn things around in the last races of the season shows that, whatever they changed, it was a step in the right direction and they are motivated now to erase the embarrassments of 2006. Conviction and determination will not be lacking in the Honda camp next year, methinks.

All of which is good for Button and Barrichello. Both drivers have made a habit of being in the wrong place at the right time or the right place at the wrong time. It may just be that, at last, they have managed to get everything right and 2007 will be theirs for the taking.