Ale🧸xander Albon says Toro Rosso’s confidence is high heading into the 2019 season after t🐈he team encountered “no nasty surprises” with its latest Formula 1 car during testing. 

The British-Thai driver will make his grand prix debut at next weekend’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix, h🐭aving graduated from Formula 2 to partner the returning Daniil Kvyat in Red Bul🔯l’s junior team for 2019. 

Albon ha🌠d not turned a wheel in F1 machinery prior to Toro Rosso’s shakedown event in Misano, but he made up for his lack of seat time by recording 489 laps across his four days of running in Barcelona. 

Asked about the strengths of the STR14, Albon replied: “Overall we're just happy with the car, there's no nasty s🌠urprises.

“The car is well balanced in low, medium and high-speed corners. The car's more or less consistent. There's no nasty surprises so the confidence is real🌠ly good.

"There's not an area ✱specifically we really need to target, but we need ♋to fine-tune the car.”

Tꦗoro Rosso was able to conduct a strong winter programme and ended up fourth in the combined pre-season mileage charts,𒁃 while Albon also managed the fourth-fastest time overall. 

"It's just been steady," Albon explained. 

"We hit the ground running pꦡretty fast to be honest, I think we already had a good baseline coming into the first day of testing. Since that, we've just been trying things out 🌊and seeing what works for us.

“I thওink it was certainly bette𝔍r than I expected, but it’s still early days and we won’t know until Melbourne how it has been really going."

Albon described his first winterඣ of preparing ahead of his rookie season as an F1 driver as “intense”. 

“There was a lot of preparati🌱on to do, you cannot believe ho🔥w many books we’re given to read - just the steering wheel pages are huge - but there a lot of other things,” he said. 

“But it was nice to have that time to learn the car from the𝓀 engineering point of view, so it was good to get that all done before actually getting into the car.

“You just have to ജbe as prepareꦅd as possible and I knew what it would take, so it didn’t feel alien coming into Barcelona.”