Ross Brawn hopes Mercedes have produced a car that will give both Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg race wins this season.
Mercedes team principal stresses need for improvement in 2012
Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn hopes his team have produced a car that will give both Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg race wins this season.
Since their return to Formula One as a full works team two years ago, Mercedes have managed just three podium positions, all of which were third places achieved by Rosberg in 2010.
They have also finished fourth in the constructors' championship in both seasons, being unable to challenge the ultimate pace of Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari.
Schumacher's contract will be up at the end of the year and Brawn says the Mercedes W03, which was launched at Barcelona on Tuesday, must be a car that both the seven-times world champion and his team-mate can reach the top step of the podium in.
"I think we need to achieve some results and Michael will continue as long as he can achieve results. We need to give him a car to do that," Brawn told
Sky Sports News HD.
Ambitions
"I think both of our drivers are more than capable of winning races if we can create the car.
"There are two ambitions I have: one is for Nico to win his first race and the other one is for Michael to win a race again.
"Wouldn't that be a great story for Formula One, if Michael Schumacher won a race again? It would be sensational."
Mercedes opted to launch their car after the first pre-season test of the year in Jerez, being the only one of the last year's top 10 teams to take this approach.
Some speculated the unveiling was intentionally delayed in order to keep a dramatic design innovation under wraps as long as possible, but no such device was visible at the launch.
Brawn said: "I'm happy about the car but we're not going to go into details I'm afraid. It is a very competitive business and we all try and keep any advantage we think we have as quiet as possible.
Improved
"Externally it looks a fairly conventional car but it's improved in every area.
"Last year we were not good enough and we looked at every aspect of the car to see how we could improve it."
Brawn also confirmed that technical director Bob Bell, who joined in April 2011, had been a big influence on the design, while new technology director Geoff Willis and former Ferrari technical director Aldo Costa will be more involved as the 2012 campaign goes on.
Brawn said: "Bob's been with us almost a year and he's been a great input to the team and a great asset to the team, I was delighted when he joined us. So he's been very involved with this car.
"Geoff and Aldo less so because obviously they joined us later in the year, but it's never a static thing.
"Wherever you start with the car, if you stay there you go backwards. You've got to go forwards at quite a rate during a season."
The W03 was sixth fastest on Tuesday, with Schumacher completing a total of 51 laps before a hydraulics problem brought an early end to their work during the afternoon.
Performance
Bell later justified their decision to skip Jerez in order to concentrate on development work by saying that outright pace is Mercedes' priority.
"I was relieved to see in Jerez just how reliable all the teams were. It seems to be an increasing focus now in Formula 1 - increasingly reliability is just a part of the engineering maturity of the sport," he said.
"It gave us the confidence that we didn't need to go and pound around the track to make sure that the car didn't fall apart. I don't want to be glib about it, but in essence that's what it means.
"Therefore we took the decision to bias our effort into finding performance, because clearly that's where we're weak: we were well behind the pace last year and the thing we had to do above all else was to close that gap.
"I haven't seen anything yet that made me think it was the wrong thing to do...it was definitely the right thing to do for us. Another team in a different position would probably do it differently."
