In western Europe in recent weeks the weather has been pretty icy, with plenty of snow. The good news that in the next few days a lot of hot air is going to be produced across the continent as the F1 teams unveil their new challengers for the 2013 season. This is F1′s optimistic season when everyone is confident that the year ahead will better than last season and that “everyone is working really hard” and “there is a buzz in the factory”. The warm air will move south to Spain in the first week of February and then will gradually begin to dissipate as teams begin to understand the real value of their 2013 cars.
For the record, the launches planned are as follows, kicking off with Lotus F1 Team tonight, with the launch of the E21 on the Official Lotus F1 Team TV channel on Youtube. As a teaser for the launch the team asked US actor Matt LeBlanc, best known as Joey in “Friends”, to ask Kimi Raikkonen a few questions about the new season.
McLaren will be the second team to launch with an event in Woking on Thursday, followed by Force India on Friday at Silverstone, although this is likely to get rather buried as Ferrari is launching the F2013 on the same day at Maranello. Sauber will unveil the C32 at Hinwil on Saturday, while Red Bull has chosen Sunday to launch the RB9 at Milton Keynes. On Monday the focus will switch to Spain where Mercedes and Toro Rosso will both launch at Jerez on Monday, followed by Caterham on Tuesday.
Williams has decided to hold fire on its unveiling and will not be showing its car until February 19 when the F1 teams will show up at Barcelona for the second of the three pre-season tests. The team decided to take advantage of the extra fortnight to develop the car more than its rivals.
Might we guess that all is not progressing well at Williams? “Taking advantage of extra dev. time” often precedes a “less testing time than everyone else” explanation before or in Australia.
Or it sometimes shows in the performance of the car on the track
Perfectly true – apols for my cynicism!
Well, Brawn missed all but the final test in 2009 and it didn’t do them too much harm.
Is there a Marussia launch?
I always enjoy this time of the season. I know they’ve been in design alongside the 2012 cars but it still always seems amazing that the short break produces these new challengers.
Good question
I used to get excited about car launches, new solutions, different parts on the cars..but now the teams are so cagey its rare to see anything that resembles the test car let alone the race car for Melbourne…shame really but this is the outright war and competitiveness of formula one we all love.
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I love the blind optimism, this has some of them listed, and from the last few years:
http://f1addicted.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/off-season-identical-news-and-talk/
It’s tempting to use Google to pick up F1 news from pre-season over the past few years, just to check whether the teams have copied and pasted the press releases and just changed the dates and names.
I have read so many comments on various sites and through Twitter – people saying that Williams missing the first test with the new car means they are in trouble.
Alonso won’t drive at the first test – does this mean he isn’t going to be a good driver this year? And didn’t Red Bull test a lower spec’d car until the final test last year? That did ok I recall…
Thanks for the clip Joe. Kimi now seems willing and able to exploit his “reticent” personality for commercial gain. That is very astute of him and I wish him very good luck with that. But it is a dicey road to travel, putting forward your personality in the public arena. Not wishing to do so in the first place was what made Kimi attractive to many fans.
Let’s hope he can bring it off.
Hey Kimi… how you doin’ ?
I have a nasty suspicion that this is actually THE Joey…
THE Joey would have gotten all excited that he was going to meet someone called Kimmy.
“Hey Finnish dude, where’s Kimmy? Is she hot?”
But then this is the launch car, not the real car, all sorts of misleading parts can be put on it to distract and misdirect opponents who will be watching the crucial areas and hopefully get them to spend time and money investigating.
Have to mention Matt Le Blank much more recently in the wonderful BBC series called “Episodes”
Williams has decided to hold fire on its unveiling
Oooh, too soon?
Joe – it seems that these days the teams almost develop a dummy car for the unveiling so as to preserve any technical developments until the first race