But Coulthard is likely to face rival Michael Schumacher and his Ferrari F2003-GA when they resume the title battle in Spain next week.

“Of course we are concerned,” said Coulthard, fifth in yesterday’s San Marino Grand Prix at Imola as a grieving Schumacher triumphed just hours after his mother, Elisabeth, died after a long illness.

“If they bring out a new car you have got to believe it is quicker and that is not good news – but it is significant it was not raced in Imola.

“Ferrari know their programme and it would be foolish of them to race the new car just because its new.

“They have done several thousand kilometres testing, but there are some issues there.

“You hear rumours of it being significantly lighter than previous cars with a lot of ballast on the floor and quite fragile which is why Luca Badoer has had a few shunts.”

Schumacher’s emotional first victory of the season left him just one point behind second-placed Coulthard, but still 14 adrift of his old rival’s McLaren team-mate Kimi Raikkonen who finished second.

“The underlying pace of the (old) Ferrari is good,” added Coulthard, who knows the new scoring system makes it more difficult to quickly claw back the deficit.

“If you had to pick your weapons to go into the next battle, you would be hard pushed to bet against Ferrari having a quick single-lap car.

“But as always in race trim we seem to be the biggest winners in terms of performance and they drop back a bit and so do Williams. We have every reason to be optimistic.

“We are going to have a late start to our new car as well. I still think the McLaren trend is upwards. Kimi has had a solid start to the year, he won’t be too dissatisfied with being on the podium each time and leading the championship.

“He has got a pretty healthy advantage to carry as we head towards the middle part of the year.

“I said at the beginning of the year we have a new world championship and a new format to it, so we have to re-write the books in many respects.

“It makes it more difficult to claw it back if you have unreliability, that hurt me in Malaysia. Its frustrating, but there are 12 more races to go.

“We can expect to be a wee bit closer than we were in Imola. Do we think we are going to go and stick the car on pole? I don’t know if we are that confident.

“But we definitely think we have a chance of racing for the podium and perhaps getting a win.”

McLaren boss Ron Dennis confirmed at the weekend that the eagerly-awaited Adrian Newey designed McLaren MP4-18 will not make its debut until Canada at the earliest.

“We will race it when we feel that it is as reliable as our existing car,” said Dennis.

“That does not mean to say that we are not going to run it soon or that it is not going to be quicker. We know it will be quicker but to finish first, first you have to finish.

“With the rules as they are currently, you have got to have reliability or else you are history.

“The cost of unreliability in practice is severe and so we don’t actually know when we’ll race the MP4-18. I’d say no sooner than Canada, no later than Silverstone.”

Ferrari decided not to risk their 2003 car in Imola because of reliability fears, but want to unleash it on the grid in Barcelona if their testing programme is successful this week.

“It was very important to win the race,” said Todt, who saw Rubens Barrichello finish in the 2002 car which won 14 out of 15 races last year.

“It was important to give a good end to this unbelievable car. If we had not scored those points it would have made life more difficult,

“With the new points situation reliability is more important than performance.

“That is the main reason why we decided to go with the F2002 in Imola because we knew the car is reliable.

“The F2003-GA is definitely better potentially, but we were not happy enough with its reliability.

“This week we are going to do a lot of testing and we are not far from what we want to achieve in terms of reliability.

“We will be in a position to see exactly where we are at the end of the week, but we are quite confident that the car will be ready for the Spanish Grand prix.”