Toyota Motorsport GmbH has today used the opportunity of its pre-season event at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing France factory in Valenciennes, France to announce a renewal and upgrade to the existing partnership with Intel Corporation.

Intel has been an official partner of the Panasonic Toyota Racing Formula 1 team since January 2004 and will continue to play an integral role in development of the team's race cars throughout 2006 and beyond as Preferred Technology Sponsor. This extended collaboration will see Intel provide the team with high-speed, low-cost enterprise and mobility systems based on the Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and Intel® Centrino® mobile technology.

The extended partnership will see the recently unveiled and brand-new Intel corporate logo appear on the rear wing and nose cone of the Panasonic Toyota Racing TF106 (and latterly TF106B) race car with immediate effect.

Since the partnership began precisely two years ago, the Panasonic Toyota Racing team has benefited significantly by expediting its product development cycle using an Itanium 2-based high performance computing cluster that increased the speed of calculation by up to four times and offered the team's engineers a more accurate and cost-effective understanding of car designs.

"We are proud to continue our mutually beneficial partnership with Intel Corporation," commented Toyota Motorsport President John Howett. "It is a pleasure to work with such a globally recognised and successful brand. Whilst our relationship is focused primarily on the IT side, Toyota and Intel are two leading brands and both strive to extract maximum benefit from the global stage of Formula 1."

"Intel's technology was a key enabler of our success in 2005," added Howett. "Our Itanium 2-based servers have significantly sped up our simulation capability while improving the simulation accuracy. Toyota will continue to take advantage of Intel's unparalleled performance to develop an edge in highly competitive world of Formula 1."