Red Bull Will Miss Valencia Test in February

Although the majority of the championship's big guns have already announced that their car launches will take place prior to the Valencia testing on February 1st – so they can have their 2010 challengers ready for test drives in the early days of February – the one team credited with the highest chances of battling for the 2010 title revealed they're likely to miss the Valencia meeting.

Red Bull team manager Christian Horner admitted that the new regulations for the 2010 season have led to the team of designers taking more time to prepare the new car, and that will likely mean the Milton-Keynes outfit will not come to Valencia with their 2010 machinery.

In addition, Red Bull will likely miss the first test of the off-season all-together, as they're not planning to show up with their 2009 car. As revealed by Autosport earlier this week, design guru Adrian Newey needs a few more days to get the job done, consequently releasing the RB6 for testing for the second official session of the winter, at Jerez.

“As in 2009, we have elected not to run at the first test with the new car, so we will join at the second test. Obviously the car is much more of an evolution of the 2009 car rather than the clean sheet of regulations that we had for last season. But even so, with the refueling change, we've opted to give our designers as much time as possible,” Horner told Autosport.

Until now, Mercedes and McLaren have both announced launch dates for their 2010 cars prior to the February 1st deadline, with Ferrari expected to do the same in the upcoming few days. In addition, Williams and Sauber also also expected to join the testing field with their new cars at Valencia.