A New Car. A New Philosophy.

The MR01, Marussia's contender for the 2012 season, has made its on-track debut, running for the first time today at Silverstone in the UK for a promotional event ahead of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne next weekend.

Team quote'The MR01 is the product of a ground-up re-evaluation of the way we go about designing our racing cars. As such, the car is almost entirely ‘new’ with very few carryover components from last year’s MVR-02. This presented our design team, led by Technical Consultant Pat Symonds, with the challenge of going back to basics to produce a solid mechanical package, whilst maintaining an eye towards achieving the incremental performance steps required to move the team forward.People and Resources'The starting point for the MR01 design programme was a consideration of our people and resources. Our former three-base operation has been consolidated into one site, the Marussia Technical Centre in Banbury, bringing the various elements of the business together to form ‘one team’. In particular, the design department and practices now benefit from far greater integration and collaboration. Furthermore, the aerodynamic department has been completely restructured and the aero methodology reinforced, blurring the boundaries between CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and experimental work in the wind tunnel, as well as enhancing the fidelity of the team’s aero approach.' The technical partnership forged with McLaren Applied Technologies in July of last year has been influential in the process and the relationship is starting to yield benefit as the advanced facilities that we have access to have been used to prove the correlation process with the MVR-02. It is however early in the relationship and the MR01 will become a beneficiary of the relationship in due course'.