Both the 35-year-old Scot and the RBR squad as a whole had pinned their hopes of a competitive season on the renowned designer’s RB3, after the team publicly wrote off its 2006 season early on to concentrate on Newey’s first car.

And now Coulthard has told Formula 1’s official website that the team still has a substantial amount of development work ahead of it before he could hit his targets in the forthcoming campaign.

“At the moment we’re not going to achieve the goals I had for the year, but we’ve got some more time to develop and hopefully, once we’ve done that, we can try and achieve them,” he told the website.

“The current things we’re working on are the gearbox, overall reliability and basically building our relationship with engine supplier Renault and learning about its electronic systems.

“The package is not yet optimized so we’ve got a lot of work to do to get the performance we want.

“There are some upgrades for the Bahrain test and some things we should have prior to Australia, which should help.”