Adrian Newey: New F1 tyre rules good for Red Bull

Following the introduction of Pirelli's new ultra-soft compound, teams will be given more control over their dry tyre allocation for each grand prix weekend.

How F1's new tyre rules will work

Newey, who is still involved in defining Red Bull's design concepts, believes it will play to his team's strengths.

"That brings some opportunities in terms of our strategies and how we use the tyres," Newey said.

"Perhaps trying to play to the fact that, generally speaking, we are quite kind on the tyres.

"We suffer less from degradation than some of our rivals, so it's an extra area that hopefully we can use the performance of the car to benefit from."

While Red Bull struggled with its RB11 chassis during the first half of the season, it ended 2015 with a car Daniel Ricciardo believed was "as good as" the title-winning Mercedes.

Newey says what the team learned as it came to grips with last year's challenger has helped shape its RB12, which will make its debut in Barcelona's first pre-season test on Monday.

"It was a difficult start to the season," Newey reflected.

"We had some handling issues through some different philosophies we tried over the winter, they didn't work out.

"But it was a very useful exercise. Often, if you have a good handling car it's difficult to learn, if you make some mistakes you can really learn from those mistakes, and that's exactly what happened last season.

"Some mistakes early on proved very valuable lessons from those mistakes.

"So by the second half of the year, I think we had a very competitive car, as was demonstrated in the middle sector at Spa, the rain in Austin, the bumpy Singapore race and so forth.

"I think we have managed to build further from those lessons last year and all of the indications from our simulations are that this year's chassis should be very strong."