Lotus launched their E20 online on Sunday evening, taking the covers off a car that features - like three of its rivals - the stepped nose design.
Out of the five teams that have launched their 2012 challengers to date, including Lotus, four have opted for a distinct stepped nose. In fact the only team not using the step to lower the tip of the nose has been McLaren.
Explaining the reason for the stepped nose, which together with the blunt tip has not gone down well with many fans, Lotus's technical director James Allison said it is because of a new regulation that has its roots in driver safety.
"Up at the front of the car, there is a very obvious changes, there is a distinctive slope to the nose. The reason for this is for years you will gradually notice that the height of the nose has been coming up and up," Allison said during Sunday's online launch.
"The reason for that is that there is more downforce if you raise the bodywork at the front of the car.
"But the problem with that high nose is that eventually the nose can get to a height that if there were to be a T-bone crash the tip of the nose could be so high that it exceeds the height of the cockpit of the other car and clearly that's a very poor situation as you don't want the driver's head having a nose slamming into it from the side.
"And so for this year we agreed that the tips of the noses all had to be lowered by a considerable amount. But the rule itself doesn't require the front of the car to be lower, it only requires the tip of the nose to be lowered."
The tech director also explained Lotus's new exhaust layout with the team having dropped the side exhaust and switched to a more conventional design in light of other new rules.
"Last year, all of the cars cottoned onto the fact that there was a lot of downforce to be extracted from using the energy that was available in the exhaust pipes. We ran a particular novel system where we exited out exhaust right up at the front of the car.
"So as a sport we decided that we would try to calm things down a bit for the following season and a new set of exhaust regulations were conceived where instead of being allowed the freedom to blow that exhaust to the underside of the car we are constrained now to exit the exhaust in a part of the car where it's much harder to generate downforce."
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