Virgin Racing today unveiled its 2010 contender the VR-01, thereby becoming the first of the new teams to pull the wraps off its first chassis.

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 technical director, Nick Wirth, who has gained a 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 team, which was launched at an event in London in December, will now focus on developing the ground-breaking VR-01 for the start of the season. At today's on-line launch all eyes were on the car's distinctive red and black livery which will take to the track at Silverstone where it will be prepared for a two-day shakedown prior to its first scheduled test in Jerez next week.

Nick Wirth's design team at Wirth Research in Bicester, UK, started putting the basic layout of the VR-01 together in the early part of 2009 in order to hit the ground running should the team's 2010 entry be successful. 12 days after the team was accepted into the world championship, the design of the monocoque surfaces was 'locked down'. The established F1 teams had a significant head start, not least because they had the obvious advantage of evolution, whereas Wirth Research designed the VR-01, quite literally, from a blank computer screen.

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. In theory, the team's pre-season testing programme began several months ago - in the virtual sense - courtesy of what is widely regarded as amongst the most progressive real-time simulator technology in motor sport. When race drivers Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi begin testing in anger next week, the VR-01 should feel very similar to the car they 'drove' on the Wirth Research simulator.

With the VR-01 now a reality, Virgin Racing Technical Director, Nick Wirth, outlined the team's objectives for its debut F1 season and the longer term: "Today is a very proud day for everyone involved with Virgin Racing," he said, "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.

"I have been fortunate to have worked with the very best designers in F1 and I am well aware of exactly what it takes to be successful in this sport. When you see what the existing teams have achieved using the conventional but proven design approach, it is unsurprising that there is a great deal of scepticism about our all-CFD approach. But we are competing in a sport that is undergoing significant change having come face to face with today's harsh economic realities. Under resource restriction, convention will become too costly and necessity really will be the mother of invention. I have absolute belief in the digital design process and the opportunity to put the all-CFD approach to the test at the highest level - to demonstrate that this could be the way for the future of F1 - is very, very exciting.