In its first two seasons known as Lotus, the Tony Fernandes-led squad proved the best of the other new-in-2010 startups including Virgin (now Marussia) and HRT. But a green-coloured car is still yet to score a point.
"That must be the goal (for 2012), but we are also realistic," Malaysian Fernandes told Brazil's Corride de Formula 1.
"We want to take steps forward in the right direction towards building long-term success. But the fact is that the only way to do that is to beat the teams that are ahead of us."
"All of them scored points in 2011," he said, chiefly referring to Williams.
"So to beat them, we will at least have to score a point. That has to be the goal," added Fernandes.
The team has released more images of the car with the higher exhaust exits clearly visible at the rear of the car. Chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne said that the focus for the CT01 had been on aerodynamics and that the new regulations banning the exhaust-blown diffusers would help the team.
"Aerodynamics is always the main focus of performance and improvement," Gascoyne said. "Last year it was all about the blown diffuser, which we struggled with because not having it in 2010 meant we were always playing catch up throughout the 2011 season in comparison to other teams.
"The fact it's banned this year certainly plays to our advantage. Other teams had so much more development time, they were able to get much more out of it than we were ever able to, so that eliminates a little of the competition in terms of technical development. But really, aerodynamics is always one of the main features of development and that's why we've put so much additional resource into it."
The car features KERS for the first time, with the Red Bull system being integrated, but the main focus has been on the stepped nose. Gascoyne said that the interest was only because the Caterham was the first car to be unveiled and that the solution would be one that he expects a number of teams to adopt.
"Well the regulations have changed to limit the height of the nosebox to try to ensure that noses don't get too high. Our challenge is that you always want to get the chassis as high as possible to allow clean air flow to the underside of the car, and what you see on the CT01 is our solution to that. As we're the first car out it is obviously stirring up a lot of debate, but because of the 2012 regulations I think you'll probably be seeing this type of nose on most of the cars this year."
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