Newey says RB5 an aggressive design

"It is quite an aggressive design," Newey said when asked about the car by autosport.com during its launch at Jerez.

"It's a design that is quite different to anything that has gone before. Hopefully for good engineering reasons.

"One of the things is having the discipline to have ideas but making sure that they really do give something rather than simply being different."

The Milton Keynes-based squad became the seventh Formula One team to unveil their 2009 challenger on Monday, nearly a month after the first of their rivals launched their car.

Newey said the late launch was not an advantage over the other teams, because there has not been enough time to re-design parts of the car.

He is hopeful, however, that the longer time used to design it will pay off.

"Not relative to our rivals," Newey said when asked if the late launch was an advantage. "We looked at the photos of our rivals but we haven't had time to study any of the routes that we've taken because we've been too flat out pursuing our own routes.

"This has obviously given us a little bit longer in design to design things and to try and make up for the fact that we are a somewhat smaller team.

"We certainly run a lot less wind tunnel than other people which has come out recently with some of the discussion on wind tunnel limitations so we've tried to use the time to some extent to make up for slightly smaller resources."

Newey admitted he had enjoyed being able to start a design from scratch thanks to the radical regulation changes coming into play this year.

"I enjoy having big regulation changes," he said. "It gives you much more of a chance for a clean sheet of paper rather than small evolutions of established things.

"Whether it plays to Red Bull or not is difficult to say. You can argue it two ways. You can say it opens up a few good ideas that can give a benefit, or you can say it plays to the teams with the biggest resources."