Pressure comes with the job when you work for Ferrari, and there was no hiding from expectation on Friday when they became the first Formula 1 team to unveil their 2011 car.
Asked if he felt an "obligation" to win, technical director Aldo Costa replied simply: "Yes."
Chief designer Nikolas Tombazis said he was "quite optimistic about this car and how it will go during the season".
And team principal Stefano Domenicali, always cautious about his public proclamations, said: "F150 was created with a simple aim. Our goal is to win the championships. We know it won't be easy, but that is definitely what we are aiming for."
It is normal for F1 teams to sound optimistic when they launch their new cars. One gets used to a seemingly endless series of wildly confident predictions about what each team will achieve in the coming year, to the point that at the first race of each season you can almost hear the whistling of air from a series of burst balloons.
Ferrari are different, though. Such a fixture are they at the top of F1, so successful have they been over the last decade, that the big surprise is if they do not turn out to be title contenders.
They certainly were last year, only to lose out in the most agonising fashion at the final race of the season when a catastrophic decision to call in Fernando Alonso for an early pit stop left him stuck behind Vitaly Petrov's Renault and let in Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel to win the race and snatch the title from under the Spaniard's nose.
However, while Alonso went into the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix leading the championship and hot favourite to win it, Ferrari know they were somewhat fortunate to be in that position.

Ferrari have worked hard to make the rear of their new car as low and narrow as possible. Photo: AP
The Red Bull was comfortably the fastest car last season and it was only a series of mistakes and failures by that car and its drivers that allowed Alonso to capitalise on a quite superb run of form in the second half of the season and take the championship lead.
In many ways, 2010 was a success for Ferrari. Their decision to drop Kimi Raikkonen in favour of Alonso paid off in spades, and they proved that a poor 2009, when they won only one race, was an aberration not the start of a trend.
But second place is not good enough for this team that carries the hopes of an entire nation, and millions of other fans around the world. And the pressure is on to at least match Red Bull for pace in 2011.
Ferrari are the only team to have been in F1 since the world championship started in 1950. And while they have been through their ups and downs, they exist to win.
When they do not, questions are asked, and Ferrari are painfully aware of how they let the championship slip through their fingers.
Yes, there was the error in Abu Dhabi - for which chief engineer Chris Dyer has paid by being relieved of his position and moved to a factory-based role.
But there was also the slow decline in competitiveness from winning the first race to a dreadful Turkish Grand Prix in May, when Alonso finished eighth having not even made the top-10 qualifying shoot-out.
This period coincided with a series of uncharacteristic mistakes made by Alonso himself that cost him a hatful of points in the first few races of the season.
In that context, their rise back to competitiveness in the second half of the season, and Alonso's near-miss in the championship, served only to remind them what might have been.
The frustration of lost opportunity, and the determination to make amends, ran through the Ferrari launch on Friday.
As Domenicali put it: "Last season we had difficult and beautiful moments, and we want to build on those beautiful moments."
So expectation is high, both within Ferrari and without, and a lot rests on the sleek new F150 that Alonso and team-mate Felipe Massa unveiled in Maranello.
To the untrained eye, the car looks similar to the F10 with which Alonso came close in 2010. But the detail hides some significant changes - and some surprising revelations.
Chief among these is the decision to retain push-rod rear suspension, rather than the pull-rod that has been used by Red Bull since 2009 and which is expected to feature on the majority of the grid in 2011.
Pull-rods had been out of fashion since the late 1980s, but were brought back by Red Bull's design head Adrian Newey - widely regarded in F1 as a genius - as a response to the major technical changes that were introduced for 2009.
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These included severe restrictions on the design of diffuser, the part of the car where the floor sweeps upwards under the rear wing and which is so important in creating downforce.
Newey's pull-rod design actually proved a handicap in 2009 following the controversial adoption by some teams of the so-called double-diffuser, around which a pull-rod was difficult to package.
But with the ban on this item, 2011 effectively marks a return to the intended diffuser regulations of 2009, and Newey's design is expected to come into its own as a way of lowering the centre of gravity and improving airflow.
Most teams are expected to follow Red Bull's lead, so it is interesting that Ferrari have chosen not to.
My sources in Italy tell me that instead they have come up with a clever repackaging of the dampers, bringing them forward in the car. This allows them to have a much lower back to the gearbox without the penalties inherent in a pull-rod design, which is very difficult to work on - the mechanics have to take the floor off to adjust the dampers.
Fascinating as these things are, no F1 car's performance is defined by one single aspect of its design - it is about how a complex package works together.
And it is clear that a lot of thought has gone into this car in the context of the rule changes for 2011 - most notably the debut of movable rear wings to aid overtaking and the re-introduction of the Kers energy recovery and power-boost systems, which come with heavy batteries that create a packaging headache.
"We had to rethink quite a lot on the car from the aerodynamic point of view," Costa said.
"The ban on the double diffuser, the introduction of the new rear wing concept and a lot of other detailed clarifications around the back end of the car pushed us to have a complete re-think about the rear of the car.
"(There's) a completely new layout with a completely new concept. Also the introduction of Kers has pushed us to review the central part of the car. Because of all these changes, Kers and then develop the car around new tyres, changes related to the safety of the chassis, it has been quite a different project."
Have they succeeded? Ferrari will begin to get the first indication next Tuesday, when their new car runs against those of Red Bull and Mercedes on the first day of the first pre-season test.
Between then and the first race in Bahrain on 13 March there are a further 15 days of testing for teams to hone their designs. And it is clear where Ferrari's ambitions lie.
"I'm feeling very motivated," Alonso says. "2010 was an interesting year for me. It was my first with Ferrari and I enjoyed the atmosphere. 2011 will be an important year with a new challenge after changes to the rules. We have to commit to everything we do and I think we are up to the challenge."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/01/ferrari_feel_pressure_to_unsea.html
"I don't think it was an easy race," Sebastian Vettel said after winning the Australian Grand Prix, but it certainly looked that way.
The world champion was never more than nine seconds ahead of Lewis Hamilton's chasing McLaren until the Englishman ran into trouble with a damaged floor on his car midway through the race. But the Red Bull driver always appeared to be in total control.
The German was 2.5 seconds clear after the first lap, when admittedly Hamilton had been compromised by having to hold off Vettel's team-mate Mark Webber at the start, and he pulled out another 0.8secs on lap two.
Although Hamilton pegged him after that, the suspicion must be that Vettel was already in cruise mode, even though he said after the race that he was struggling with tyres in that first stint.
It was probably not a coincidence that the margin between the two men on that second lap was pretty much exactly the same as it had been in qualifying. That's how much faster the Red Bull appeared to be in Melbourne, at least in Vettel's hands.
There was a sharp intake of breath along the pit lane in Albert Park when the sheer speed of the car was finally unleashed in final practice on Saturday morning and nothing that happened after that did anything to diminish that impression.
Following Vettel's pace in qualifying, his fastest race lap was nearly half a second quicker than Hamilton's. On that evidence, McLaren and the rest have some work to do if they are to stop Red Bull running away with the championship.
That said, it is unwise to read too much into the results of the first race of the season - particularly in Melbourne - and it remains to be seen whether Red Bull's advantage will be as big at other circuits this season.
Albert Park can be a bit like that. If a driver and team get everything just so in conditions that leave others struggling a bit - exactly what appeared to happen in Saturday's cool weather - it is possible to eke out a quite extraordinary advantage.
The mind immediately turns to 1997, when Jacques Villeneuve was on pole position in Australia by 1.8 seconds from his Williams team-mate Heinz-Harald Frentzen. Michael Schumacher's Ferrari was third on the grid that weekend, 2.1 seconds slower than Villeneuve - and yet the title battle went to the last race of the season between the Canadian and the German.
The common denominator between that Williams and this year's Red Bull is Adrian Newey, then Williams's chief designer, now Red Bull's chief technical officer and for some time F1's pre-eminent genius - and I do not use that word lightly.
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Like the Williams FW17, the Red Bull RB7 is the third iteration of a car-design concept. This is what Newey is like - he does not always nail the key to unlocking a set of regulations but when he does, as he has with this generation of Red Bulls, he just keeps chipping away, refining the concept, and the others find it very difficult to catch up.
Further evidence of Newey's uncompromising approach to design emerged after the race on Sunday, when Red Bull team principal Christian Horner revealed that the team had decided not to use their Kers power-boost system after Friday.
The fact that Red Bull's drivers did not use Kers in qualifying led to tongues wagging in the F1 paddock on Saturday, when there was speculation they had a mini-Kers system that would be used only at the start.
The truth was more mundane. Red Bull have been struggling with Kers reliability all winter and the team decided it was more trouble than it was worth in Melbourne.
Red Bull's problems with Kers have been created by Newey's absolute determination to make the car as fast as possible - and to trade off performance as little as he can.
"Adrian being Adrian would not compromise the car around the system," Horner told BBC Sport, "so the systems had to fit into his aero shape."
This has led to problems with reliability - not for the first time with a Newey design honed to the nth degree. In this case, the car is so tightly packaged that the team are finding it hard to manage the heat the Kers system generates.
Red Bull say they are working hard to get the system on to the car for the next race. But Vettel's performance in Melbourne may well reignite the debate that has been raging in F1 since Kers was first introduced to the sport in 2009.
That is as follows - putting Kers on a car makes it about 0.3secs a lap quicker. But, under the current regulations, can a car optimised without it - or in the case of Red Bull, designed with fewer compromises than normal - actually be made to be quicker? There is no definitive answer to that question for now; perhaps one will emerge over this season.
There were many more subjects about which the same could be said.
Most striking of all, perhaps, is what on earth happened to Webber in the second Red Bull? He and the team both shared the general mystification about the massive gap between the Australian and Vettel.
Fernando Alonso's post-qualifying prediction that Ferrari would be stronger in the race was proved right with a fighting drive back to fourth from a terrible first lap, during which he was briefly down in 10th. There was nothing fake about Ferrari's pace in pre-season testing - what can they achieve when they have a smooth weekend?
Alonso just missed a podium thanks to a superb drive from Renault's Vitaly Petrov in a car that is genuinely quick. It immediately made you wonder what the injured Robert Kubica could have achieved in that car.
There will be no quick answer to that one as the Pole continues his recovery from the terrible injuries he received in his rallying crash last month. But even with Petrov in it the car is a contender. The Russian's experienced team-mate Nick Heidfeld will surely bounce back from a poor start. Can Renault keep up with the breathless pace of development at the front?
The much-talked-about moveable rear wing, or drag-reduction system as it is officially known, seemed to work pretty well - in that it made overtaking possible but not too easy, although the debate about whether it is a step too far in terms of artificiality will doubtless continue.
If Sauber's Mexican rookie Sergio Perez continues in the manner he has started - notwithstanding the team's disqualification for a technical infringement - how long before the rumour mill starts wondering about this member of Ferrari's driver academy replacing Felipe Massa as Alonso's team-mate?
All these and more will keep people guessing for much longer than the two weeks before the Malaysian Grand Prix.
But there is no doubt about the biggest question of all. Hamilton said afterwards that he was confident McLaren could catch Red Bull. Is he right? On the evidence of Melbourne, the season could depend on it.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/03/can_anyone_catch_red_bull.html
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