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New philosophy for F2012 - Tombazis

Nikolas Tombazis: " Ultimately as far as I'm concerned an ugly car is the one that doesn't win" © Ferrari

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Ferrari chief designer Nikolas Tombazis says that the the team has adopted a new philosophy for the F2012 and that it has been aggressive chasing aerodynamic performance.

The new car was unveiled online on Friday, and features a prominent 'stepped' nose where the lower nose meets the front of the chassis. Having only won one race in 2011, Tombazis admitted that the team had adopted a more aggressive philosophy for the design of the car in order to close the gap to McLaren and Red Bull.

"At the start of the design phase of this car we decided to apply much more aggressive targets and we had as a principal objective to recover our aerodynamic deficit compared to our main competitors," Tombazis said. "We have established - and I think it's fairly clear - that we were down on aerodynamic performance compared to our opponents so we've had to work quite hard to recover that.

"It is fairly clear that in the previous years we have been disappointing in our results and therefore we decided to analyse the reasons of that and to change fundamentally the philosophy we apply in the project. So having done this analysis we also realised that we were probably a bit too conservative in some areas of the car and we decided to follow a much more aggressive approach for this year. I think you can see the result of this aggression when you look at the car; we also hope that it will be visible at the track."

While the car is already visually striking, Tombazis also said that the team would be carrying out "some very important experiments" during testing as the car is developed ahead of the first race.

"This car is still destined to change quite a lot before the first race. We have already been working in the wind tunnel and the technical office on aerodynamic upgrades for the car, but we also have some very important experiments we want to carry out in the first tests so that we can then finalise the first race configuration."

Tombazis added that he didn't feel it was an ugly car, and that how he looked upon it would ultimately be determined by results.

"There's been some rumour saying that the car is ugly. I have to confess - but I'm not very objective on that - that I don't share that opinion. For me, I've got used to the bump on the nose. I think that the rest of the car has been the fruit of a lot of detailed work. Ultimately as far as I'm concerned an ugly car is the one that doesn't win and a beautiful car is the one that does win, so for now I want to believe it's a beautiful car and then we'll have to review that after the first few races."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.