Late car launch could be a good decision - Webber

The decision taken by RBR to launch their 2009 contender until February 9, which is much later than the rest of the top teams, could be both good and bad argues race driver Mark Webber. The Australian believes that the hundreds of testing kilometres less could be outweighed by the longer time spent in development.

Webber shared his views in his BBC column: "Come the third or fourth race would we have preferred to have that extra 600-800km on the car? Some would argue yes."

"If we can keep that sort of reliability up with this car," talking about the excellent reliability experienced by the team last year, "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."