The season of hope and hype is with us; already Toyota and Ferrari have revealed their challengers for 2007 and McLaren will do the same today. All the teams are excited about their new cars and expect great things in the coming races. It was ever so.

One thing that seems to be common to all the launches so far (plus the Red Bull RB3, as yet un-launched but discussed by Adrian Newey recently) is that the cars are completely new – the only item retained from the previous model is the brake pedal. It’s good to know that at least everyone’s getting that darn pedal right.

Seriously, however, these launches do enable us to view the new cars and look for fresh ideas. Very often it is impossible to see any great changes, especially when the color scheme is altered, so disguising details that would be apparent otherwise. Toyota have followed in this tradition and their new car looks pretty much the same as last year’s.

The Ferrari is changed considerably, however, especially in the front suspension department. I do not pretend to understand all this talk of single and zero keels but the difference is plain to see: the lower wishbones have moved upwards. Apparently this will mean a lot of work adjusting the suspension to suit the tires and is one more change that the team will have to deal with in the coming months.

Otherwise the Ferrari red has shifted slightly to a more orange shade and white outlining has appeared at various edges. It is still very identifiable as a Ferrari, however.

Now we await first sight of the new McLaren, a car described by its drivers as the most beautiful they have ever seen. So much rides upon the performance of this car that we hardly care what it looks like. “Will it be quick?” is what we all really want to know.

And that’s the thing about launches – they are interesting from the technical point of view but nobody knows how well the cars will go until the lights go out for the start of the first race. Even testing is a notoriously bad indicator, any number of teams in the past having had their hopes buoyed by good testing times only to be brought down to earth when the races show up serious deficiencies in the car.

So pardon me if I find it hard to get excited by the launch season and have lumped three together like this. If anyone comes out with something truly ground-breaking and different, my enthusiasm will know no bounds, I promise. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on what is happening and long for the start of the season.

Just like everyone else, I suppose…

Shuhei Nakamoto, the Honda senior technical director, has been speaking of the way forward for the F1 team. Obviously, he read my recent post on Toyota for he identifies the same weakness that was infecting Honda and details the remedy applied.

Innovation is the most important factor in F1 design; without it one can only hope to run just behind the teams that are breaking new ground. Nakamoto has instilled this concept into his design team and his methods of doing so form the perfect blueprint for racing success. I particularly like this statement:

“We flattened the organisation so that everyone working in (each) department can talk freely about their ideas and opinions.”

That is a philosophy that uses all the talents and ideas of any team and we saw the result in Honda’s improvement mid-season in 2006. It seems to me that Honda have found the right man to take Honda to the championship in the coming year. Button for 2007!

I have to admit, however, that I am reminded of an old joke that should perhaps be allowed to rest in its forty-year old grave. But I cannot resist; please excuse this rare lapse into levity:

It seems that in the early days of testing the new Concorde airliner, the engineers ran into a problem. Every time the plane was put into a dive, the wings would break off. This was disconcerting for the test pilots, who were becoming fed up with the repeated need to bail out, and the engineers were frantic in their efforts to find a solution.

Money was running short and still the wings refused to remain attached to the plane. In desperation, the engineers put a suggestion box on the shop floor and tried all the responses they received but none worked. Finally, at the eleventh hour, they were down to the last suggestion, one so ludicrous it had been dismissed without a thought.

It made no sense at all. The idea was to drill two-inch diameter holes along the complete length of the wing roots. Surely this must weaken the structure, thought the engineers; but desperation makes fools of us all and they decided to give it a try. The holes were drilled and the plane tested.

To everyone’s amazement, it worked. The plane was soon swooping around the skies, doing barrel rolls, vertical dives, anything that was asked of it. So impressed were the engineers by this that they started a search for the genius who had suggested the cure. It turned out to have come from Albert, the plant’s lavatory cleaner. He was called up to the design office and congratulated.

During the course of the celebrations, the chief engineer asked Albert how he’d come up with the idea. The old cleaner answered in his rough cleaner’s dialect:

“Well, sor, I been lavatory cleaner at this ‘ere plant for nigh on thorty-foive year now. And I tell ee, in orl that toime, I done noticed that toilet paper never do tear along the dotted line…”

I’m sorry. I’ll shut up now.

Why can’t Toyota win? So asks “Colenzo” in the BBC Motorsport forum and he then goes on to put the blame on a lack of expertise amongst the team’s personnel. Which may have something to do with it, although I have a lot of respect for their senior chassis manager, Pascal Vasselon.

Toyota have been involved in F1 for several years now and the combined experience and knowledge of the team should be as extensive as Honda’s or BMW’s, for instance. Yet still they fail to convince.

Money is not the problem; the budget is supposed to be one of the largest in F1 and rumor has it that Ralf Schumacher is now one of the best paid drivers. So what is Toyota doing wrong?

The answer may lie in the very fact that Ralf drives for them. Not that he is the root cause of their failures but more that his continued presence, and Trulli’s for that matter, indicates a certain lack of imagination in the team’s management. After a flurry of driver changes when they entered F1 (and they sacked some pretty good ones), Toyota has inexplicably settled for their present driver line-up.

Ralf has always benefited from the secondhand aura of his elder brother; at any moment, we still expect that the Schumacher magic will blossom in him and he will prove unstoppable. The trouble is, it hasn’t happened and I doubt now that it ever will. Ralf has driven for some very good teams in his career and yet his results have been uniformly disappointing. Yes, we have blamed car failures, bad luck and too high expectations for his performances but, in fact, he has been given far more decent chances than most drivers get. If his name wasn’t Schumacher, I think he would be driving for one of the lesser teams by now.

And then there is Jarno Trulli, famously the qualifying specialist. How he must hate that title by now! It does nothing but put a huge question mark over his race performances and we forget the times when he does well. The truth is that Jarno is inconsistent – sometimes he is brilliant but, more often, he is merely competent. And his recent demonstration that he is not a team player also raises doubts over his suitability for Toyota.

So why is the Japanese giant sticking with their drivers? I can only put it down to an unwillingness to try something new. This would fit with the ethos of the company too, their faith in tried and tested technology having won the road cars a reputation for reliability but also leading us to look elsewhere for innovation and invention.

Consider the drivers that have been available this year. Mark Webber would have been a good choice, a driver of undoubted speed and with that Australian grit and determination that Toyota so desperately lack. Or the team could have gone looking amongst the horde of young drivers clamoring to get into F1. With their budget, the Toyota execs could easily have bought themselves a Vettel or a Paffett.

But no, Toyota stick with what they know. And that attitude is bound to affect such things as car design and race strategy. For the moment, F1 is still an arena where “he who dares, wins” and Toyota are paying the price of their conservatism.

Look at the chances other teams take. For the sake of a few tenths of a second off lap times, Ferrari were willing to risk their wheel inserts being banned; Renault did the same with the mass dampers. One team got what they wanted, the other didn’t – but both tried. When was the last time you heard of a Toyota tweak that came under suspicion from the FIA? It’s just not their style; they wait until other teams have had an improvement accepted and then they stick it on their cars. Note the bristling “ears” on the Toyota’s nose; no-one seems to know what they achieve but Ferrari has them and so does Renault – Toyota must have them too.

It’s not the way to win championships. To do that, you have to be prepared to try new ideas and take a few risks. Throwing money at the problem is never enough.

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David Richards, boss of Prodrive, has been talking about how the team plan to enter F1 in 2008. His ideas are very interesting, stemming from previous experience with the Benetton and BAR outfits, and he makes some good points.

As we knew before, Prodrive do not intend to build their own car but to buy in a chassis as well as an engine from a manufacturer, effectively to become a manufacturer’s second team, similar to the the arrangement between Honda and Super Aguri. You can see why he wants to take this route; after years of struggling to make the BAR effective, he knows how difficult it is to start from scratch. With the regulations changing in 2008 to make this sort of deal legal, it becomes possible to shortcut the learning process and become competitive within a year or two.

Richards points at Toyota and Honda as examples of how long it takes to develop a car sufficiently for it to win races. And it is true that any team new to F1 has years of hard work in front of it before it can expect success. Or is it?

History can give a few examples where things happened the other way around. March, Wolf and Arrows were immediately competitive when they arrived on the scene and time only saw them slip further and further down the field. Logically, they should have become better as they learned the ropes; in reality, they may have improved but it seemed that everyone else did so faster.

So Prodrive’s strategy may well be the way to go. Certainly, it seems to be the trend of the moment and there might come a time when every manufacturer has a second team. This has benefits for both sides: the client team gets to go racing on a smaller budget and the manufacturer gets double the chance of doing well. Again historically, however, it has the disadvantage that second teams finish second.

It also raises the question of which manufacturer would enter such an arrangement with Prodrive. With the rest already committed to engine deals with other teams, only BMW and McLaren/Mercedes could do it. Word on the street is that Prodrive fancy Mercedes, but I wonder why either German company would bother with such an added complication. Both are hard at work trying to get to the top step of the podium – it makes little sense that they should dilute their efforts by the addition of another team at this stage. Give them the success that Renault has achieved over the last couple of years and they might be prepared to do it; until then, I think it’s a non-starter.

You could say that Toyota are taking that chance by allowing Williams to have their engines but, as I have mentioned before, I think there are good reasons for this. In a few years there will be only one Toyota team and it will probably be called a Toyota-Williams.

It will be very interesting to follow Prodrive’s progress in establishing an alliance with another team. Personally, I like this move to customer teams and it might be the only way for small teams to continue in F1 in the future that looms over them so ominously. But it is not going to be easy, that’s for sure!