With an eye on the usual suspects McLaren and Ferrari, Red Bull mogul Dietrich Mateschitz thinks yet another team could be a real challenger in 2012.<\/p>\n
Referring to Mercedes, he told the Austrian newspaper Kurier that the Ross Brawn-led team seems to have come up with “very good improvements” and “a major development”.<\/p>\n
He is believed to be referring to clever new systems on the W03, with the latest discovery said to boost top speed significantly by combining ‘DRS’ with a new and legal F-duct solution.<\/p>\n
Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko agrees that the Mercedes idea is “shrewd”, adding that there is not time to fit a similar system to the RB8 before Melbourne.<\/p>\n
Triple world champion Niki Lauda told Germany’s RTL television: “I think the McLaren and the Red Bull cars are on par.<\/p>\n
“Mercedes is the big question mark — I think they are also really fast.”<\/p>\n
Finally realising Mercedes’ apparent speed, a newspaper recently crowned the Brackley based team the ‘Bluff champion’ of the 2012 winter.<\/p>\n
Michael Schumacher, however, insists it has not been a deliberate strategy.<\/p>\n
“Formula one is just so complex that we simply don’t know much about how the other teams are going.\u00a0 Clearly, the W03 is a step forward,” he told Bild-Zeitung.<\/p>\n
“The question is how big our step has been compared to the others.\u00a0 We really need to wait until the first race.”<\/p>\n
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