» Mercedes shows off its W03 challenger

Today’s opening day of pre-season testing at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya began with the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team finally taking the covers off its 2012 challenger, the W03, which it hopes will allow it to compete more regularly with the top-three teams this year.

Designed by an enormous technical team headed by Bob Bell, Aldo Costa and Geoff Willis, the W03 has already enjoyed shakedown tests at Silverstone last week and Barcelona two day ago.

At the first of this year’s three pre-season tests, the team opted to bring along its 2011 challenger, the W02, in order to better familiarise itself with Pirelli’s modified tyres. Now, with this useful data, the team was able to make last-minute refinements to the W03 ahead of its first appearance alongside the 2012 cars launched to-date.

Like almost all of this year’s cars – except McLaren – the W03 has opted for the ‘stepped’ nose ~~eyesore~~ design concept, which has proved the popular solution under the new regulations which demanded that the cars’ nose sections must be lower.