MOTORSPORT: Ricciardo loves his new missile

Daniel Ricciardo has his new car for the Formula 1 season now less than four weeks away and he’s smiling more than ever.

Red Bull Racing introduced its RB13 model to the world overnight with a video online and four-time grand prix winner Ricciardo declared it “quite beautiful”.

“It definitely looks sleek,” said 27-year-old West Australian Ricciardo, who was last week announced as carsales.com.au and motoring.com.au’s global ambassador.

F1’s 10 teams – one less than last year after the recent collapse of Manor – begin the first of two four-day tests in Barcelona tonight, Australian time, before the cars are flown to Australia for the season-opening GP in Melbourne on March 24-26.

Showing that it had no qualms in using the devil’s number, 13, RBR displayed its new model for Ricciardo and his teenage teammate Max Verstappen under a sign saying ‘RB13 UNLUCKY FOR SOME’, at times blanking out the ‘UN’.

And it ran a caption saying ‘Stroke that rabbit's foot, grab that four-leaf clover, fling that horseshoe and crank up the Stevie Wonder, the RB13 is here’.

Like other new cars apart from the Mercedes W08, the RB13 has a ‘shark fin’ over its engine from the roll bar to the rear wing.

Most intriguing about the car is a small air inlet in the nose, although much of the forthcoming testing is likely to focus on the aerodynamics around, over and under the middle of the cars, which are wider under this season’s rules and sporting wider tyres and lower rear wings than in recent years.

The extra emphasis on aerodynamics has renewed Red Bull’s genius technical director Adrian Newey’s interest, while the V6 hybrid power unit from Renault – which will be badged TAG-Heuer again in the RB13 – is now claimed to produce 900 horsepower.

That may still leave it some way down on Mercedes, which was said to have achieved that output a year ago before racing to its third straight constructor and driver titles.

RBR was the only team other than Mercedes to win GPs last year, with Ricciardo victorious in Malaysia – and robbed of success in Monaco by a team mix-up in the pits – while Verstappen triumphed in Spain on his debut after his promotion from Red Bull’s junior team, Toro Rosso.

Verstappen too has declared himself very happy with the RB13. "The car looks very aggressive ... hopefully when it looks that aggressive it will be fast,” he said.

RBR team principal Christian Horner has called it "one of the prettiest cars" the team that won four consecutive constructor and driver championships in 2010-13 has produced.

“The geometry of the car under these new regulations and proportions looks right,” Horner said.

“It looks mean, it looks fast. There's the old adage that ‘if it looks right it tends to go all right’, and this car for sure looks right.”

The team’s senior aerodynamicist under Newey, Dan Fallows, said that with the new regulations “we get a lot more freedom from areas of the car that can deliver performance – and we always like to have the ability to play around with these areas”.

While there will be a lot of attention on how the new cars compare in testing, Horner downplayed that.

“It's all irrelevant in reality,” he said.

“You've got to focus on your own program, put the blinkers on, get through your program of work and the developments that you want to look at, because it's all going to change by the time you get to Melbourne anyway.”

The new cars generally are not as spectacular as had been anticipated.
Mercedes has lengthened its wheelbase by 15cm, while Ferrari hasn’t changed its. However, the SF70H from the stable of the prancing horse has a very pronounced leading edge to the floor protruding in front of its cockpit.

The first of the Barcelona tests will run through until Thursday (March 2), with the other next week from Tuesday to Friday (March 7-10).