Alexander Albon says Toro Rosso’s confidence ཧis high heading into the 2019 season after the team encountered “no nasty surprises” witꦚh 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, having g🦹raduated from Formula 2 to partner the returning Daniil Kvyat in💮 Red Bull’s junior team for 2019. 

Albon had 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 record💃ing 489 laps across his four days of running in Barcelona. 

Asked about the strengths of th༒e STR14, Albon replied: “Overall we're jus💦t happy with the car, there's no nasty surprises.

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

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

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

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

"We hit the ground running pretty fast to be honest, 𒅌I think we already had a good baseline coming into the fir꧑st day of testing. Since that, we've just been trying things out and seeing what works for us.

“I think it was✃ certainly better 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 winter of preparing ahead of his rookie season as an F1 driver as “ꦛintense”. 

“There was a lot of preparation to do, you cannot believe how many books we’re ಌgiven 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 the engineering point of view, so it was good to get that all done before actually gettin🐓g into the car.

“You just ha🎃ve to be as prepared as possible and I knew what it would take, so it didn’t feel alien coming i♔nto Barcelona.”