Tom McCullough talks about the behind the scenes work Aston Martin had to do with their 2021 F1 car after the regulations changes plus side-by-side 2022 work.
Aston Martin knows it is not the fastest car on the grid this year. Often, this mentality can give way to greater innovation and technical advancement, as there is only room to go up. The British team has taken its advancements in its stride, pushing both their drivers and their car to heights not felt before.
Mid-season, Aston Martin’s McCullough sumarised the team’s intricate developments amid the regulation changes. As we already know, the team started out the season on the backfoot and a bit behind in performance compared to the competition, as it carried the low-rake design, which was affected negatively by the new regulations – they are one of the team outfits to have it alongside Mercedes.
“It is a well-known fact that we started the season on the back foot, because of regulatory changes that had affected the aero performance of low-rake cars more adversely than high-rake cars,” said McCullough. “Our car is a low-rake car.” That of course, didn’t mean that the team stopped developing their car. Aston Martin has been hard at work developing and finessing their machine.
“Since then, though, I want to acknowledge the tremendous amount of very hard work that has been done by our colleagues in aero, design and manufacturing, who have tirelessly clawed back that performance deficit, inventing, and making aero updates that we appraised first in CFD [computational fluid dynamics], then tested in the wind tunnel, then, finally, manufactured and fitted to our race car,” said McCullough.
While tremendous amounts of work are clearly going into the current Aston Martin car, the same will being done with their 2022 F1 car. The series will be undergoing some regulation changes completely altering the look, feel, and driving style of the cars. As McCullough states, “it has been a very impressive body of work, and I salute my colleagues for it. However, like almost all the teams, after the summer shutdown we will transfer that effort and resource to the task of making our 2022 car as competitive as possible.”
Aston Martin’s progress this season has been an achievement, with the team continuing to push higher in the results each race, as they sit seventh in the standings with 48 points, in the fight for fifth. Although the car admittedly needs work, the team feels confident about their performance, as stated below. “It is working,” said McCullough.
“We know that our car is still not the fastest, but it is now closer in performance to the cars of our principal rivals than it was at the beginning of the season, and that is the result of a carefully managed programme of aero improvement that has necessarily involved trial and error but has also delivered real results.”
Nothing comes easy. The front runners on the F1 grid are pushing as hard as they can, but so are the rest of the teams. It is important to highlight the hard work of every member of these teams, as they are the reason each team continues to leap forward in excellence. Aston Martin in particular, has had to push extra hard as they started the season in a deficit due to regulation changes.
The story was written by Neeladri Nag
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