Unveiled: Yorkshire's first Formula 1 racing car

The VR-01 is the first of a new breed of race car designed entirely in the digital domain using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics).

It is the brainchild of Virgin Racing's technical director, Nick Wirth, who has gained an international reputation for pioneering a purely CFD approach to car development, wholly designing, building and testing race cars in computer simulation without the need for expensive, resource-heavy scale-model wind tunnel testing.

The Virgin Racing team concept looks to exploit and capitalise upon F1's new economic dawn.

The team - borne out of John Booth's Manor Motorsport marque in Dinnington - was launched at an event in London last December, but with the focus now firmly on developing the ground-breaking VR-01 for the start of the 2010 season, it was fitting that the roll-out of the new car should also be 'all-digital'.

Most F1 teams use CFD in the design process but in tandem with scale model testing in one or more wind tunnels. The VR-01 is the product of six months of pure CFD development involving thousands of design solutions generated by the technical team at Wirth Research and the state-of-the-art technology at their Bicester base.

Wirth said: "Today is a very proud day for everyone involved with Virgin Racing, however on this occasion, where the car is the star, I want to pay tribute to all the amazing people at Wirth Research who deserve so much of the credit for the VR-01.

"Putting together an F1 team, assembling an engineering group and designing a new car from scratch is an epic task in the timeframe we have been working to."

Booth, Virgin's team principal who launched Manor from his own garage in 1990, said: "Today is the culmination of a very emotional journey which really began in June last year when we celebrated the fantastic news that our entry into Formula 1 had been accepted.

"The celebrations were necessarily brief however, because we were already in a race against time to design and develop a race car at the same time as building a new team of people and premises.

"I have always had the utmost confidence in Nick to design a good race car, just as he has the faith in the race team to make a good job of operating it.

"Having worked closely with the technical team over the past 10 months, I know that the VR-01 is the product of a very intensive and thorough design and development process and my excitement at seeing our first race car make its track debut later this week is shared by every single person involved with Virgin Racing."