Once again the F1 paddock is taking aim at Red Bull

The bullseye of the target is red – the Red Bull that is.

Infiniti Red Bull Racing has won the last three Formula One World Drivers’ Championships with hot shoe Sebastian Vettel, and the team has won the prestigious World Constructors’ Championships for three years on the trot as well.

“We have a big target on our back,” acknowledges Vettel’s teammate Mark Webber. “Everybody wants to beat Red Bull. We understand that. We want to beat everybody else.”

Unlike many F1 drivers who have no interest in the past days of F1, Vettel is a keen historian of the sport. But when it comes to this year’s championship fight he is looking forwards not backwards.

“It’s one thing to look back at what we have achieved as a team,” Vettel says, “but really we all start again from zero. So we’ve all got the same chances. It will be a long year, a lot of races and a very tough challenge waiting for all of us.”

The Red Bull Renault RB9 is the successor to the cars that have won 28 of the 58 races over the past three seasons. It’s the latest creation by genius Adrian Newey, so it is fast. But will it be fast enough? With the technical rules virtually unchanged from 2012, other teams will close in on the Red Bull.

McLaren Mercedes started and ended last season with the quickest car, but the team stumbled around in between those two highs thanks to mechanical failures and operational errors. The team has worked hard to avoid a repeat of those costly letdowns.

“We looked at the mistakes we made operationally at the track,” McLaren’s Sporting Director Sam Michael says, “and there were some very visible ones. But we had a number of other issues that were not so evident from the outside but they cost us, so we really sat down and reviewed the entire way we do things. It also includes the mechanical reliability as well.”

All of those things really come down to human factors.

“But not always human mistakes,” Michael clarifies. “There are a couple of things that can go wrong. Either the procedure is not being followed. Or it might be extremely difficult to follow a procedure with the time constraints or equipment that you have.”

Ultimately, there were five or six races last year where the McLaren car just was not quick enough.

“However in the other 14 races we were fast enough to win and we did win a lot of those,” Michael says. “But if we had had a perfect operational record we would have been fighting for the championship at the end of year even with the mechanical reliability problems and even with the performance not being there for five or six races. Likewise, if anyone of those three things had been perfect, we would have been in the championship hunt in Brazil. If you get all of them right, then you have a very strong team.”

McLaren’s MP4-28 was quick in preseason testing, and wily veteran Jenson Button is going to be a contender this year. Just how strong McLaren will be as a team overall depends on new recruit Sergio Pérez. With only two years of F1 experience at Sauber, the 23-year-old Mexican has been thrown in the deep end at McLaren. Just how long it takes for Pérez to be consistently fast and fighting at the front remains to be seen.

Ferrari also underwent a major overhaul in the offseason. Ferrari knows it has to start this season in fast-forward mode instead of arriving for the season-opener in Australia on the back foot, and then having to play catch-up as it has in recent years. President Luca di Montezemolo reveals that changes to the team’s infrastructure involved a threefold strategy: an obsessively-detailed review of last season; major changes to the organization and work methodology; and, the concentration on just one wind tunnel.

Ferrari’s 12-year-old wind tunnel is outdated and needs a complete overhaul. This year the team will do all of its aerodynamic work in Toyota’s wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. The team has also appointed two Deputy Chief Designers who will oversee the new car design for alternate years. Both report to Chief Designer Nikolas Tombazis and Technical Director Pat Fry.

Simone Resta is responsible for this year’s car. It’s called the F138, which refers to the 2013 model year and pays homage to the final V8 engine in a Ferrari F1 car. The rules will require V6s in 2014.

“There will be two or three teams who will win the majority of the races,” Fernando Alonso predicts. “We need to be one of them.”

Three questions hang over Ferrari: Can it have a car that is quick from race one? Will Felipe Massa keep his job? And, what is going to happen in the deteriorating relationship between Alonso and his team?

Massa’s F1 career nearly ended last year because he really struggled to be competitive. Some deep thinking and a visit to a sports psychologist finally turned things around for him, and in the final two races he actually out-paced Alonso. Ferrari has retained Massa for another season, but he will have to maintain his rediscovered form if he wants to keep his job in 2014.

Alonso has built up the Ferrari team around him over the past three years. They were championship contenders in 2010 and 2012 when the title was not decided until the final race of the season, but paddock scuttlebutt says the honeymoon is over. Alonso is getting frustrated the team can’t provide him with a competitive car throughout the season, and the team is growing weary of Alonso’s demanding nature. Alonso definitely was not a happy camper prior to the season beginning. Will his relationship and attitude with Ferrari improve or deteriorate as the season progresses?

Another driver whose job is on the line this year is Romain Grosjean. He was fast but erratic in 2012, and had way too many high-profile accidents. The Lotus team is keeping faith in Grosjean because of his speed and potential, but he will have to avoid those controversial on-track clashes if he wants to stay with Lotus.

Ken Tyrrell, the team boss who won three world championships with Jackie Stewart, used to say that you can hone the rough edges off a fast driver, but you will never make a slow driver fast. Grosjean needed some honing, but has he had enough?

There is no doubting Kimi Raikkonen’s speed. After two years away from F1 playing in rallies and NASCAR, The Iceman made a fabulous comeback last year. He won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and finished in the top three on six other occasions. The Lotus Renault E21 looked impressive in preseason testing. The question is not if Raikkonen will win a race this year, but how many?

There’s a good chance that Lewis Hamilton won’t win a single grand prix in 2013. He’s scored at least two victories in every season since he made his F1 debut in 2007, but he’s left the winning McLaren team for a new challenge at Mercedes. Since it bought the Brawn team in 2010, Mercedes has amassed a total of one victory. The team started off strongly last year but then floundered.

“I’ve got to prepare myself knowing that the car was a long way off last year,” Hamilton admits. “At some places they were almost two seconds off the pace, but I do know that they’ve made some improvements on this year’s car.”

Hamilton’s teammate, Nico Rosberg, is equally circumspect about the prospects of the Mercedes W04.

“I’m confident,” Rosberg notes, “but to start the season as we did last year, being one of the fastest cars? Not so confident. The gap was quite big at the end of last year, and first we need to close that gap. That’s our main target for the start of the season, and I’m very confident we will manage to achieve that. Then the big improvement needs to be in the rate of development, because last year we really flattened off in the middle of the season.”

Red Bull and McLaren each won seven times last year. Ferrari took three victories, with Lotus, Williams and Mercedes each winning once.

“The contenders will be the same we have seen in the last few years in terms of the consistency throughout the year,” Button predicts of the 2013 season. “Red Bull and Ferrari; Mercedes have a good chance, but they are coming from a long way back in terms of where their car was last year. Lotus, a few tweaks to that car and they could be there fighting for wins.”

“And then you have the smaller teams that can also win races, as we saw last year, and be competitive and fight from the front. People will have learned from the McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari what really works on a car, and you are going to see a lot of cars competitive at the first race. So it is going to be consistency through the year and development of the car throughout the year that is really going to win you the title.”

Sauber, Force India and Williams fought the midfield battle last year and finished the championship in that respective order. Can any of them consistently run up with the five top ranked teams?

Rounding out the field are Caterham and Marussia. This is the fourth season for both teams and neither has been able to finish in the top 10 even once, or earn a single point. Both have ramped up efforts, but will they finally be able to get into the points?

A far more serious question is, 'will all 11 teams be around in 2014?'

After struggling for three years, the low-budget HRT team folded last year. The worldwide recession hit Formula One hard. Only Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes, Toro Rosso and Ferrari have sound financing in place. Of the rest – Williams, Sauber, Lotus, Caterham, Marussia and Force India – only Lotus did not have to resort to getting a pay driver (or two) to bring cash, or a driver who could bring sponsorship to support the team this year. There is an agreement amongst the teams to cut costs, but it is going to have to be far more drastic to keep all the teams in business for the long term.

In 2012, seven different drivers won in the first seven races in a season that would eventually see eight winners. Part of this was due to the unpredictability of the Pirelli tires, which caused some wild race finishes. But things calmed down as the teams figured out the tires. Pirelli has revamped its tires for 2013, so some of that unpredictability will be back. Will the teams get on top of it sooner than last year, and thus are there likely to be fewer winners? On the other hand, except for some minor tweaks, the technical rules are pretty much the same as last year. So there is no real chance of one team making a technical breakthrough and dominating.

“The way that last season started with a lot of different teams and drivers winning a race, there is nothing that speaks against that happening again this year,” Vettel says. “At some stage it will be getting even closer at the top, and therefore everyone is in the hunt, even down to what we saw last year – Williams set some highlights and won the race in Barcelona not because they were lucky, but because they were fast. We have to wait and see.”

The biggest question of all: Will Red Bull, Vettel and Webber end this season with the target still on their backs? Or will another driver and team win the championship and take over the bullseye? As Vettel says, we will have to wait and see.