Newey hopeful of development with RB3

The new car, which was rolled out at the Circuit de Catalunya this morning, is very characteristic of the kind of design that Newey produced at McLaren. Its thin nose and triple deck front wing are twinned with aggressive sculpting around the sidepods and rear of the car.

But Newey has insisted that the car is not simply just an updated McLaren design.

"Undoubtedly some aspects of RB3 are 'McLarenesque' and are, to some extent a development of the work I was doing there. In other areas, there are derivatives of what has been done here at Red Bull. And, of course, there are some completely fresh ideas."

Newey says that the design concept of the car is actually quite evolutionary because F1's technical regulations have not changed for several years.

"The car will run to a set of regulations that are now in their third year," he said. "Surprisingly, the change from V10 to V8 did not have a fundamental effect on the packaging of the cars.

"As far as the aerodynamic regulations are concerned, the last big change came ahead of the 2005 season. As such, the car is an evolution of some ideas that have been seen before, but aggressively packaged in a car that we hope will have a lot of development potential."

Newey said that the switch to Bridgestone tyres this year had been taken into account with the design of the car.

"We have to design a car that will run on Bridgestone tyres that we are not familiar with," he explained. "Of course we've done our research, but we've also designed a bit of flexibility in the car to deal with this."