Oliver WhiteRed Bull Racing this morning took the wraps of their 2009 contender, the Adrian Newey designed RB5. The Jerez circuit in Spain provided the backdrop as Sebastian Vettel took the machine out for a few installation laps. The RB5 is the third chassis to be penned by Newey for the team, their fifth since taking over from Jaguar in 2005. Mark Webber was also present and is expected to return to driving on Wednesday following his cycling accident 11 weeks ago that left him with a broken leg.
The car looks sleek and follows the new regulations of narrow rear wing and low, wide front wing. The nose appears quite high, unlike the Ferrari and McLaren counterparts, but like Ferrari the team have opted to put the mirrors out wide, connecting them to the sidepod rather than the monocoque. Last season, Red Bull famously debuted the famous shark fin cover, although the launch vehicle seen today didn’t have one. Toyota have tested one though, so Red Bull may still have that part waiting in the wings.
With a dark livery the car actually looks reasonably attractive and will hopefully bring Red Bull Racing closer to the front of the grid. The squad will be eventually be using Renault’s KERS system, although the development across all teams in this area seems to have slowed a little. But after a fairly unimpressive 2008 campaign, the Milton Keynes based team will need every advantage they can get to close the gap to the front runners.
Images © Red Bull Racing.
car looks nice. Hope they have a good year
I hope so too. Vettel in my opinion is surely the best driver on the grid beside Alonso, and I hope he got the right car to make something big happen :).
The saturation on those Webber/Vettel pose shots bugs me. The pair look like they’ve seen a ghost.
That aside, in a F1/geeky kinda way I quite excited by the prospect of the RB5 this year. It’s about time Mark ‘Chris Amon’ Webber had the chance to show us he’s not just the one-lap specialist from down under and actually win a race. Fingers-crossed!
Yeah, it is quite strange. I can only assume the photographer messed up, but then said it was done on purpose, of course! 😉 I was going to caption them with “cheer up mate, the gear box might last a race distance this year.” And then it didn’t in testing. 😆
Great looking machine- much better than the BMW, and worlds better than the Renault.
What I really like about it is the rear wing structure- the paint job dose a good job of making it look acceptable.
very nice looking car…I particulary like how the eyebrow bodywork over the front suspension looks…my guess is that it will become the first car of the season to have its front wing torn off.
It is a smart looking car and it certainly doesn’t need full color saturation to show it off. I like the color scheme much better than last year and Vettel running up front will get it on camera quite a bit.
Sadly I must agree that it does look better than the BMW F1.09 even though I’m a bit biased.