Dan Fallows: We still can’t figure out AMR24

The 2024 season is going very badly for Aston Martin – you could say many times worse than the previous one, because then it had 273 points after 21 stages, and now only 86.

At the same time, during the year the British team reported with joy about achievements of a different kind: the new base at Silverstone, in which literally billions have been invested, is being completed, a new wind tunnel will soon be operational, but more importantly, Adrian Newey will join Aston Martin next spring, the most successful racing car designer in Formula 1 history.

But the fruits of all these certainly positive changes will not ripen quickly, but for now the team faces great difficulties. For some reason the cars of its rivals, Haas F1, Williams and now Alpine, are going faster and faster, although the picture varies from track to track, and the Aston Martin drivers, when they earn points, do so with great difficulty . . Fernando Alonso last managed it three races ago and his teammate Lance Stroll has not reached the top ten since the Hungarian Grand Prix in July.

What are the reasons for such obvious problems? Both fans and the motorsport press ask this question, but one thing can be said more or less with confidence: compared to last year, the Aston Martin car still became faster, but its rivals advanced at a faster pace.

In preparation for the 2024 season, the British team set itself the goal of developing a chassis that would be characterized by stable performance, so that the AMR24 car would be sufficiently efficient and the drivers could drive more comfortably. At the same time, Aston Martin has developed a season-long modernization plan, with the intention of introducing technical innovations at almost every stage, and not in two large complexes, as last year.

“Although we partially achieved the goal, we found that the car was characterized by drivability issues,” Dan Fellows, the team’s technical director, told Racecar Engineering. – A number of features have emerged that were previously hidden.

As the season progressed, more and more new things became clear, so we still can’t fully understand the car. But it seems other teams have encountered a similar problem.

Another difficulty is that problems only really occur on a real race track (and not on a simulator). They are mainly related to the car’s behavior in different phases of the corner, with the AMR24 underbody acting on different parts of the corner. different numbers. In addition, in most cases new products work as we expected, but consequences may arise, the severity of which we have somewhat underestimated. In other cases we had anticipated these, but it turned out that they had a greater impact on chassis performance than we expected.

All these little things together prevent us from reaching the desired speeds with the car and making its behavior more predictable for the racers.”