Analysis: Red Friday in Maranello and Moscow

Formula One's past glories and future hopes will be highlighted in Maranello and Moscow on Friday when champions Ferrari and newcomers Midland unveil their 2005 cars.

The launch of a new red racer at Ferrari's historic Maranello factory is always an occasion, as much social as sporting.

This time, however, the Italian glamour team, the only ones with an unbroken pedigree stretching back to the first Championship race in 1950 and beyond, cannot count on the sport's undivided attention.

Leaving it later than ever, with the Australian Grand Prix opening the season in Melbourne next week, the F2005 unveiling risks being upstaged by another in Moscow's wintry Red Square.

President Vladimir Putin is away but Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone are on the guest list for the ground-breaking launch of a team who promise to put Russia on the Grand Prix map.

It will be the last hurrah for Jordan, the rock 'n roll rebels who could once claim to be the sport's best known brand after Ferrari when colourful Irish entrepreneur Eddie Jordan was at the helm.

The Silverstone-based team, on their last legs when they were bought by Russian-born Canadian businessman Alex Shnaider last month, will be renamed Midland F1 in 2006 with a distinctly Russian flavour.

"We want to portray the progressive image that Russia has today - modern, intelligent and successful," Shnaider told Reuters in an interview.

Ecclestone is expected to use the opportunity to revive talk of putting on a Russian Grand Prix, probably in Shnaider's St Petersburg birthplace, after failed attempts to bring Formula One to Moscow in the past.

Indians will also be paying more attention to events in Moscow than Maranello, with a state of high excitement leading up to Narain Karthikeyan's race debut as the country's first Formula One driver.

Jordan, with a Toyota engine hurriedly shoe-horned into a chassis first designed for a Ford Cosworth unit, and Karthikeyan will not give Ferrari's seven times World Champion Michael Schumacher any sleepless nights.

But Friday's Moscow launch is all about the future, with the emergence of new countries and new investors on Formula One's ever-expanding world map after the arrival of China and Bahrain last year.

The Maranello presentation is more focused on current success and domination, with Ferrari chasing their seventh Constructors' Championship in a row after winning 15 of 18 races last year.

The F2005 is not due to see action until the fifth round of the Championship in Spain in May, however, although some suspect that may change if it proves reliable and fast in testing and rivals threaten to run away with the early races.

Until then, Schumacher and Brazilian Rubens Barrichello will race with an updated version of the F2004.