F1 gets ready for pre-season testing on 5th February (w/VIDEO)

With just 48 days until the start of Practice 1 at the Melbourne Grand Prix, the F1 teams are hard at work finalising development while preparing for their all-important media launches, most of which will occur in early-February (see below for details).

Mercedes stole our attention during the past week with Toto Wolff joining as their new Motorsport Director, Lewis Hamilton’s arrival at the factory and those mischievous rumours about McLaren’s Paddy Lowe taking over from Ross Brawn.

Ferrari, ran their annual Wrooom event held with Ducati at Madonna di Campiglio ski resort in the Italian Dolomites, and this year the team confirmed that Felipe Massa will debut their new car, while new recruit Pedro De La Rosa will share testing duties with the Brazilian at Jerez between 5th and 8th February. Meanwhile Fernando Alonso will miss this first test session while he focuses on his physical preparations for the season ahead.

Lotus F1 were first to share something about their new car (listen below), while McLaren are first with a promo video to shake off those winter blues and re-focus our minds on racing.

Absent from the launch schedule below is Marussia, who parted company with Timo Glock this week (losing him to BMW’s DTM squad) and are yet to confirm his replacement. Marussia are known to have made a loss of $48million in 2012 (losing out on the $12million of prize money for 10th place in the constructors championship) and are thought to be in the throngs of negotiating the final seat – perhaps with either Vitaly Petrov or Adrian Sutil.

Note: We’ll update this page as we receive more launch content from the teams. Please check back regularly if you’d like to keep in touch.

Launch content

Scheduled new car launches

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