Aston Martin started the season with the second-best car in the field, but the last few weeks have taken a turn for the worse. Mercedes and Ferrari seem to have come alongside and McLaren too has suddenly got a taste for it and was a few times faster than the AMR23. How will Aston Martin approach the second half of the season in terms of updates?
That question was put to Tom McCullough, performance director of the British formation, in Belgium in the presence of GPblog. After all, Aston Martin, like all other racing teams, has to deal with the budget ceiling that has to be respected. But: the team is also going downhill in terms of wind tunnel time. Last season they finished seventh and at the time of the recalculation of the number of hours allowed in the wind tunnel, Aston Martin was third in the World Championship.
When will AMR23 come out on top again?
While Aston Martin has seemingly stalled a bit in recent months, the competition has made leaps and bounds. Will the AMR23 only get faster again when development at the other teams becomes more stagnant? "If I knew what others would be doing, hey, so, we've been targeting quite strong development throughout the year, we have budget to keep developing the car, that's our aim, so bringing some steps all the way to the end of the championship," McCullough said.
"As much as we can do, there are some, at a certain point you have to fully focus on 24, but we're in the phase now where you're able to work on both cars, and even some of the lessons you learn on 24, you can adapt as well, whether it's in CFD, wind tunnel or the mechanical side. So, we're just pushing to the end."
More top speed
In the first races, the Aston Martin excelled in the slow and medium-speed corners, while top speed was somewhat disappointing. A lot of work has therefore been put into that recently. "I think one of the development threads we had this year was to get on top of some of the straight line speed and DRS switch sizes that maybe weren't as competitive as some teams at the start of the year, I think the last few races, and again here [at Spa], the step we've brought, that's an area we've been focusing on, we have been improving that, but again, nobody stands still, so yeah, we're just trying to look at where we weren't as strong, trying to improve those areas without losing the strength of the car that we had before", McCullough said.
