Webber confident he will be up to speed

The Australian broke his right leg in a bicycle accident during his Tasmanian challenge - and is not scheduled to get back into the Formula One cockpit until next month.

However, despite the lengthy lay-off, Webber thinks he should be quickly up to speed - and able to provide a strong enough challenge to new teammate Sebastian Vettel.

"I'm going to learn a lot when I drive the car for the first time," Webber wrote in his official column for the BBC. "I am extremely confident things will be right but if I have to adjust a few things if I get any soreness in the leg, then I will.

"I do not think I will be disadvantaged as a result of breaking my leg and I can tell you now that I will not be using it as an excuse in Melbourne. I will be there ready to go."

Webber's return to action coincides with the launch of Red Bull's new car - with the team being one of the last to unveil their 2009 machine.

Although Webber concedes that launching so late is not ideal, because of the limited time it gives the team to iron out reliability problems, he thinks there is still enough time for them to get on top of any issues.

"We are the last of the major teams to launch our car - on 9 February," he said. "That probably helps me in the sense that I will be in better shape by the time we run it for the first time but it might not be the best solution overall.

"Come the third or fourth race would we have preferred to have that extra 600-800km on the car? Some would argue yes.

"But there is a lot of stuff you can do now to make sure the cars are reliable - and we had very good mechanical reliability last year. We only had one failure - on my car in Singapore. The other one, in Germany, was a holed radiator from a stone.

"If we can keep that sort of reliability up with this car, then our chief technical officer Adrian Newey's decision to delay the launch to give him more development time to get a bit more performance out of the car could be a good one."