The F1 launch season began in earnest earlier this week with the unveiling of the new Ferrari F10, the car scheduled to carry Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso through the coming year.  Hopes have been high for the F10 since the Maranello team’s designers, led by Aldo Costa and Nikolas Tombazis, abandoned work on last year’s F60 in order to concentrate their efforts on the 2010 machine.

The designers might have been hard at work, but one wonders whether the Original Thought department have been on an extended break.  It’s difficult to look at the F10 and escape the conclusion that Ferrari’s efforts were concentrated on borrowing design concepts from everyone else.  The most obvious visual differences from last year’s F60 are a new nose design heavily influenced by the Red Bull RB5, and sculpted sidepods oddly reminiscent of those seen on the BMW F1.09, a car which did nothing to mark itself out as ripe for plagiarising.

Also noticeable is the increased length of the car and resultant longer wheelbase, brought about by the need to accommodate a larger fuel tank than the one carried in 2009.

Rumours from Italy, reported in Britain by The Times but so far unsubstantiated, have it that there is some concern about the F10’s projected performance figures, and that a B-spec car is being hurriedly designed and put together to improve matters.  Any alarm would be caused by wind tunnel performance and simulation data, since the car has yet to run for the first time – cold, icy conditions at their Fiorano test base have prevented the team from giving the car a shakedown.

How much of a worry that is for fans of the Italian team isn’t clear; every single team will start the Bahrain Grand Prix with a car substantially modified from the one appearing at their launch.  Cars evolve, whatever their purpose, and a racing car evolving before the start of a season isn’t a story.  A fundamental redesign, though, would be an altogether different thing.  One to watch, perhaps.

Meanwhile, in Newbury, a place that rivals northern Italy for cold, ice and absolutely nothing else, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton unveiled the new McLaren MP4-25 earlier today.  Compared to last year’s MP4-24, a beautiful machine that was also desperately slow for much of its life, the most obvious visual differences from the front are a Red Bulling of the front end, albeit a much more conservative effort than Ferrari’s design, and a reshaping of the sidepod air intakes.

Compare the 2009 car with the new model side-on, however, and things are markedly different.

For a side-by-side comparison of MP4-24 and MP4-25 that doesn’t require you to flick between two links, direct your browser here.

The fin on the engine cover, the only blemish on an otherwise very attractive face, is designed to improve airflow to the rear wing and also accommodates a cooling duct made necessary by a repackaging of the car’s internal cooling systems.  The chassis and bodywork have been lowered, and the rear of the car has been modified to make better use of the double diffuser (banned for 2011, but very much a part of the 2010 regulations) that had to be hurriedly shoehorned into the back of most of last year’s grid.  As Nigel Mansell once famously said, “If it goes as fast as it looks, everyone else had better watch out.”

1995, of course, didn’t end all that well for Nigel.

With the knowledge gained during 2009’s rapid recovery fresh in their minds, it’s easy to assume that the MP4-25 will be as fast on the timesheets as it looks on camera.  Next week, we’ll take the first steps towards finding out how safe that assumption is.