Formula One news

Webber questions late car introduction

The Red Bull Racing team is one of the last teams to introduce their 2009 contender. The team will launch their car on 9 February at Jerez. Webber wonders if it wouldn't have been better if the car was ready a few weeks earlier in order to test an extra 600 to 800 kilometres.

Mark Webber is still recovering from his leg injury. The Australian broke his leg in November during an event he supports and is hoping to return in the car next month. "I have got another four weeks before my first test in the new car at Jerez in February and then my new team-mate Sebastian Vettel and I are sharing the testing load at the three further tests before the season starts in Melbourne at the end of March," Webber said in his column for the BBC. "I'm going to learn a lot when I drive the car for the first time. 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.

We are the last of the major teams to launch our car - on 9 February. 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."

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