Aston Martin Formula 1 technical director Dan Fallows says that the team’s substantial Imola upgrade package is “aggressive” – and he insists that there is still more to come.
For the first European race of the season the AMR24 features a new front wing, nose, floor and floor edges, diffuser, engine cover and rear suspensions fairings.
Early running at Imola on Friday was inconclusive, and the team’s progress was not helped when Fernando Alonso had a major accident in FP3 on Saturday.
While the team has brought several packages already this season – for example at Suzuka – Fallows conceded that this weekend set of updates is the most significant thus far.
“Yeah, it is quite aggressive,” he said. “We knew we had a car we that we had a lot of opportunities with.
“At the beginning of the season we wanted to make sure we had continual upgrades coming through. So this is probably our biggest one to date. But it’s just part of our plan, and we want to sort of keep going with this in the next few races as well.”
Fallows says that the updates were initiated after testing in Bahrain, rather than as a result of how the car performed in the early events, when the car performed better in qualifying than in races.
“I think the majority of this update has been based on what we saw from the launch car, from the car in testing, and then how we wanted to sort of evolve that,” he said.
“We’ve seen some circuits suit our car better than others. And something we focused on, trying to make sure we can perform everywhere, whenever we need to.
“It is generic, it’s trying to make the car more competitive. There are areas we can see where we need to make specific improvements. So we’ve certainly worked on those.”
Fallows said it was key to ensure that the AMR24 is competitive on different types of tracks and a range of faster and slower corners.
“We have an era of ground effect cars where they have specific windows of performance that you’re always trying to sort of broaden that.” he said.
“And you want to make sure when you bring an update that it does perform in all the different conditions. I think we’re all kind of trying to chase the same thing, really.”
Expanding on the quest for consistency he said: “I think we’ve seen that some circuits, some conditions, we’re better than other times.
“And it’s obviously something we look at quite closely, to try and make sure that when we develop a car in the future that we try and sort of iron out those differences.
“But I think everybody’s working very hard to try to sort of understand when we do our performance that we add it in the right way. I think that’s the key thing for us.”
Fallow admitted that at times last year’s upgrades didn’t perform exactly as predicted, and that it’s important to ensure that they work as planned.
“Whenever you bring an update, then you obviously would like to just put it straight on the car, and it does exactly what you expect,” he said.
“But there are different ways of looking at the data, and obviously different things that may be slightly unexpected once you’ve put things on the car.
“We have done some learning in some areas, we’ve realised where we can we can push things harder than we could before. And some things we have to be a bit more careful of. It’s been a learning experience.
“And I think we have a bit more confidence now that these upgrades do work. And we’ll see again today. But there’s been a lot of hard work to try and understand that.”
Adam Cooper F1 