The RB3 has completed it’s first official day of testing at the Barcelona circuit with no major problems. The team tried several different winglet variations through the day as Mark Webber had his first go in the Adrian Newey designed car, despite having some trouble with grip at Barcelonas new chicane Mark seemed happy with how the day went:

“I think the car feels good, to be honest. But there are still a lot of things that we have got to get on top of. As you know the car has done 60km in its whole life, so it is very, very early.”

“My first impressions are that it will be good.”

Reports indicate that the times were fairly close to the new Honda RA07 which has been running for several days around the track, clearly though we’ll need to wait until the 30th when the RB3 has it’s first serious test to get a solid indicator as to the performance of this car though Mark, Adrian and Christian were all smiles in the garage.

In site news, I’ve added another 6 images to the hi-res gallery so thanks to Red Bull Creative for that; all images within are for personal use only.

Red Bull Racing has launched the RB3 in Barcelona. The first Red Bull car to be designed under Adrian Newey certainly looks the part (lean and mean), and will hopefully be the car to get a break through win for Red Bull Racing and Mark Webber in 2007.

High quality RB3 images have been added to the wallpapers and gallery sections on this site. You can also check out smaller pics of the new car at the F1Racing website.

Happy Australia Day everyone.

The RB3 has completed it’s first on track laps. Details are sketchy but it appears Red Bull took two photos then leaked them out to garner some interest, they’re shown below:

It looks pretty good from the limited angles we see here. The packaging looks tight and clean indicating they aren’t needing 20 million flickups to claw back downforce; this should aid straight line speed. The sidepods have a very McLaren feel to them, while the rear wing looks like a Renault concept and the wing mirrors are very F248. View the pics in larger format in the Mark Webber forum.

As I’m sure most of you have noticed, the Full Race Downloads are back for the time being. During the break I’ve uploaded a couple of new vids and I’ll be bringing those online in the next couple of days. I should also point out that we have a new contributor, Marshall the marshal - he’s been collecting F1 videos since before his dad was born. He’ll be uploading videos mainly from the 70s and 80s so thats something to look forward to in the coming months.

The first race he’s been kind enough to add is the Brazilian GP from 1987 at Rio, a worthy addition. I’ve also put Monaco 1997 up for download, JV fans probably won’t appreciate this one but it’s a good race none-the-less, especially for supporters of RBR and the teams that came before it. I hope you enjoy them both.

In other news, the RB3 is scheduled to be doing a shakedown test today before the launch on Friday, I’ll keep you all updated if this does indeed occur and if any pics get smuggled out!

Today it was announced that Red Bull Racing will indeed be joining forces with the Swiss engineering company Oerlikon. See my RBR and Oerlikon post for more details about the company and what they can (hopefully) do for RBR.

Something that all Mark Webber fans will be worrying about in 2007 is reliability, coming off one of the most shocking seasons I can remember; every time Mark looked like getting a good result in ‘06 the car would break. The new Renault will be supremely reliable but there must be a question mark over the RB3, Neweys designs have always been a little fragile because he pushes the edge of the design envelope.

With that frame of mind I thought a few facts and figures might be in order. Kimi Raikkonen is generally accepted as the unluckiest driver in F1 when it comes to mechanical failures but does it actually come close to the truth? Us Webber fans may feel Mark is the one with all the rotten luck (even though you’d hardly ever hear commentators or writers mention this - the exact opposite of Kimi) but do the stats back us up? Lets see.

This list I’m about to show is a recording of every drivers % of DNFs that have been attributed to mechanical problems on formula1.com, it was compiled by DOLOMITE at the Planet-F1 forums, it had extra drivers but I’ve filtered it to just leave those who will be racing in 2007:

25% = Mark Webber (22/87)
24% = Kimi Räikkönen (25/105)
23% = Rubens Barrichello (55/236)
23% = Jarno Trulli (38/167)
22% = Nico Rosberg (4/18)
21% = Nick Heidfeld (25/117)
20% = Takuma Sato (14/70)
19% = David Coulthard (41/212)
18% = Fernando Alonso (16/88)
18% = Jenson Button (21/119)
17% = Giancarlo Fisichella (31/179)
17% = Alex Wurz (9/53)
17% = Ralf Schumacher (27/163)
10% = Felipe Massa (7/71)

So it is indeed Mark who comes out on top, not surprising for us, but if you listened to the mob you’d be convinced that Kimi was miles out ahead here, and Mark only had a high DNF ratio because he put it in the fence every race; now you have some hard ammo to counter those ideas. Heres hoping the RB3 is fast AND rock solid.