Jules Bianchi will kick off his season of Friday practice duties this weekend in China.

Despite remaining under contract to Ferrari’s development programme, the Frenchman was signed to be reserve driver at Force India this year.

The team said 22-year-old Bianchi will practice during “a minimum of nine” Friday sessions this season.

The first will be in Shanghai late this week, according to the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

The report said Bianchi, who will also race in the Renault World Series in 2012, will take over Paul di Resta’s Mercedes-powered car in the initial free practice session beginning at 10am local on Friday in China.

“I hope it (the role) will put me in a strong position to one day move into a race seat,” Bianchi said in January.

The 2012 ‘F-duct’ controversy looks set to keep running for now.

“It’s not over yet,” confirmed Red Bull advisor Dr Helmut Marko to Germany’s Auto Bild.

In Australia and Malaysia, the threat of results protests hung over the opening races of 2012, due to some teams – chiefly Red Bull and Lotus – questioning the legality of the aerodynamic innovation on Mercedes’ 2012 car.

Until now, the FIA has declared that the system – working in unison with the driver-operated DRS – is fully legal.

But it has emerged that Lotus technical director James Allison has come up with another argument against the technology that will be posed to the FIA’s Charlie Whiting ahead of scrutineering for next weekend’s Chinese grand prix.

It is believed that while Ferrari is on Red Bull and Lotus’ side at present, Mercedes-powered McLaren is currently staying out of the debate altogether.

 The recently revealed ‘W-duct’ aside, another technical secret has been discovered aboard Mercedes’ newly launched W03.
Rumours insist the German squad was the last to reveal and test its 2012 car because it boasts a few highly innovative ideas that could drive Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg to the middle of the podium.

Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport reports that mechanics working for the Brackley based team are making more efforts than usual to hide the front and rear of the car, and erecting huge screens in front of the pits between test runs in Barcelona.

But a big secret is now out of the bag, and it’s located beneath the rear rain light and being described by insiders as “like a double diffuser”.

Italy’s La Gazzetta dello Sport said the feature is believed to produce an effect similar to the one pioneered by Mercedes’ predecessor Brawn GP in 2009, which resulted in the championship for Jenson Button.

And according to Auto Motor und Sport, the concept differs to the banned double diffuser because the air is channelled through holes at the rear of the engine cover.

The concept, despite complying with the FIA’s blown diffuser clampdown, also reportedly involves the clever redirection of exhaust gases.

And yet another innovation on the Mercedes could be a passive ‘F-duct’-style addition to the car’s new rear wing, working alongside the ‘DRS’ system.

When asked about the ‘ducts’, Rosberg and Schumacher played it coy: “What’s that?” Rosberg answered, while Schumacher joked that it sounds like something that should go “quack!”

“They are a good team,” Red Bull team boss Christian Horner told Sky when asked about Mercedes.

“They have some good people so it would be foolish to underestimate them.”

Meanwhile, TZ newspaper in Germany reports that the FIA could be set to clamp down even harder in the area of exhaust blowing.

There are rumours Renault and Mercedes-powered teams are still using clever engine mapping techniques for aerodynamic effect.

The Force India VJM04 is the first car created by the team under its new technical director Andrew Green, who exactly 20 years ago was one of the men behind the original Jordan 191.

Green and rest of the Silverstone-based teamForce India on Tuesday brought up by the rear by becoming the last formula one team to reveal its 2011 car.

After some website glitches, the VJM04 was launched online by the Silverstone based team.

“Everything is different, but visually a lot of it is subtle,” insisted the team’s new technical director Andy Green.

The most obvious change to the car compared with its predecessor is the switch from a conventional roll-hoop to a Team Lotus-style ‘blade’ solution.

“But there are a lot of (other) differences under the skin that people won’t necessarily notice,” added Green.

The Mercedes-powered car will debut at Jerez on Thursday.

faced major challenges created by the changes in the 2011 FIA Technical Regulations, with a cut in downforce and the movable rear wing chief among them. In addition Pirelli has become the new tyre supplier, and the teams have agreed to allow the use of KERS again. The result is a car that is very different from its predecessor.

‘Everything is different, but visually a lot of it is subtle,’ says Green, who re-joined the team in July 2010. ‘The most obvious visual change is that we’ve gone away from a conventional roll-hoop to a blade. This gives us a small packaging improvement compared to a more conventional style. The engine cover is different, in-line with the abolition of the F-duct system. But there are a lot of differences under the skin that people won’t necessarily notice.’
Force India VJM04

The ban on double diffusers and other changes in the rules created a drastic cut in downforce at the rear of the car. Getting it back has been one of the major challenges of the winter.

‘We’ve recovered a lot of the aerodynamic performance, we believe. We still have a little bit to go, but we are still in the process of the realignment after the end of last season, because it does take a long time to move aerodynamically from one position to another. The movable wing is a whole new game, and we’ll be trying to exploit its performance to the max.

‘We’ve also put in a lot of work trying to maximise the potential performance of the new Pirelli tyre compounds. To this end we’ve recruited a new senior tyre engineer, Jun Matsusaki, to guide us through the development process. The test we recently conducted in Valencia was a good learning exercise.

‘Exhaust management will also be a big area of development this year. There will be an upgrade for the first race, so there are some changes that will come into effect at the Bahrain test. Further down the line there are some big updates for the front of the car coming in for the first European race.’
Force India VJM04

Significantly the team has done far more than simply address the new rules. It has also gone back to basics by taking a close look at the fundamentals of last year’s package, and attempted to address key areas of concern.

‘Towards the end of last season there was a drop-off in our relative performance,’ says Green. ‘In theory we were adding performance to the car, but it wasn’t getting translated to the track. We decided to have a very close look at what was happening on the car, and what could be causing this. The bottom line is we didn’t extract the most from the blown diffuser, thus over the winter we’ve taken a reasonable philosophy chance on the aerodynamics of the car in order to try and prevent the sort of drop-off in performance that we saw at the end of last year.’

In addition the team has focussed on improving its performance in high downforce spec.

‘Looking back over the years the cars we have produced here have always struggled at the high downforce tracks – they always been ‘slippery’ cars. We’ve identified a problem, and now we have to fix it, and it means that potentially there’s another strategic aero change coming as well.’

Underlining the team’s renewed focus on aerodynamic development, there will extra emphasis on gathering data on the Fridays of race weekends.

‘We are going to be using the real car at the track as a validation tool for the aerodynamics, which is something that we haven’t done effectively before. There’s a lot more focus on what’s actually happening on the car aerodynamically. To measure it at the fidelity that we need to measure it at is a huge task.

‘We understand how important it is, and we’re in that game now as well. That will start to feed back into the aerodynamic development of the car. When we get positive results it backs up our development tools, and when we don’t, we’ll investigate why. Fridays will be a lot more about understanding the car we have as well as understanding the track at the time and the tyres you’re running.’

The change requires more accurate sensors and different procedures for gathering data, better analysis tools, and dedicated people at the trackside focussing on the aerodynamic performance.

Force India is not entirely new to KERS. The 2009 car was designed to utilise the Mercedes system and the team ran it in testing, although it was never raced.

‘The Mercedes KERS system looks very strong, and we’re really happy with it. We’ve done a lot of running in the simulator, so the drivers are well up to speed with how to use it. We’re well developed with what we have to do for harvesting and deployment. It’s smaller and lighter than in 2009, and packaging required very few vehicle compromises.’

Summing up, Green says the intention is to build momentum over the course of the year as developments come on stream, and the aero work pays dividends.

‘There are some big developments in the pipeline, probably bigger than this team has seen for quite a while. I think we’re looking for a much stronger finish to the season, and we do recognise the fact that there’s an Indian GP on the calendar, and we are an Indian team. The plan is to be putting stronger performance on the car through the year that will lift us up the ranks.’

Force India will launch its 2011 car early next week.
With last year’s VJM03 having been used for the opening group test at Valencia this week, it had already emerged that the new car would make a later bow at Jerez.

The Jerez test takes place from next Thursday.

Mercedes-powered Force India has announced that the VJM04 will be revealed online two days earlier, on the afternoon of Tuesday February 8.

Force India’s Adrian Sutil is expecting the team to be overhauled by Williams for sixth place in the world championship.

Currently, the Silverstone based team holds a two point advantage over Williams with three races to go, while Sutil is 6 points ahead of Rubens Barrichello for tenth place in the drivers’ championship.

“Rubens is getting dangerous, and the Williams car is currently a lot better than ours,” German Sutil, who is contemplating moving away from Force India at the end of the season, told Auto Motor und Sport.

He said he doubts the Mercedes-powered VJM03 will be much improved for this weekend’s Korean race.

“I do not expect our pace to be much better or worse than recently,” said Sutil, who made his debut with the team in 2007 when it was owned by Spyker.

The 27-year-old said he has not yet made a decision about whether to stay at Force India in 2011.

“Not yet. It’s harder than I thought,” said Sutil.

“It’s not just thinking about next year — you also need to look further ahead,” he added.

Red Bull is reportedly closing on a deal to be equipped with Mercedes engines for the 2011 season.

The German newspaper TZ reports that the move would involve the currently Mercedes-powered Force India team switching to Red Bull’s current engine supplier Renault.

Red Bull has been pushing for a Mercedes deal for some time, or minimally an allowance amid the engine development ‘freeze’ to bring the underpowered Renault V8 up to speed.

The report said Mercedes may be amenable to ending its relationship with Force India due to the Silverstone based team missing scheduled payments.

It is said that F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone is involved in the negotiations, as McLaren remains in a position to veto Mercedes’ alliances with customer teams.

Championship leader Mark Webber said on Thursday that the weakness of Red Bull’s otherwise dominant RB6 is its engine power.

“We know that running on long straights is not a strength of the car and hasn’t been for quite a few years and we know why,” said the Australian.

“We can still keep up at these tracks, but I think if we had to have 17 races in a championship, we wouldn’t choose Spa and Monza to have races at,” added Webber.