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Aston Martin’s Formula One team unveil the AMR24. (1:24)
Aston Martin’s Formula 1 team has unveiled the car it hopes will leave the gap for reigning champion Red Bull in 2024.
The team says the new car, named AMR24, is an evolution of last year’s model, which started the season competing for regular podiums but lost ground to its main rivals midway through the year.
After running in second place early in the 2023 season, Aston Martin finished fifth in last year’s championship, 22 points behind McLaren, 126 off Ferrari, 129 off Mercedes and 580 points off Red Bull.
Despite the gap at the front, technical director Dan Fallows is confident his team has learned from its 2023 crusade and believes all of Red Bull’s rivals will close the gap at the front of the grid this season.
“I think, inevitably, when you have a team that’s doing as well as Red Bull have done since 2022, it’s inevitable that there will be some kind of convergence on their solutions,” Fallows said.
“I think with the existing regulations it’s not easy to have visually different cars, so I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see some convergence. I think that’s in many ways more interesting. It’s the convergence of lap times that we’ve seen: other people are getting a lot closer.
“We’re looking to locate the lap time now from smaller details, more detailed elements of the floor and other parts of the car. But there’s still plenty of time in the next round. “
“We think the Red Bulls are surely beatable, that’s what we’re going to do next, we’re focusing on them, and that’s what we’re aiming for. “
Although Aston Martin pulled away from its closest rivals last year, Fallows believes the team ended 2023 with strong progression for this year’s car.
“We’re looking to improve and learn, and I think when we look at last season’s trajectory, we set ourselves up in demanding, controlled situations to solve them,” he added. We did well at the end of the season, after overcoming some mess we had brought to the car mid-season and ended up getting a podium in Brazil.
“So we just showed that there is a huge amount of determination and capability in this team. But it’s important to us that represented momentum, and we wanted to take that momentum into the winter and into this car, which I’m confident we have done.”
The team has continued with Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll as drivers this year and will continue to use Mercedes engines, gearboxes and rear suspension parts.
Fallows mentioned the nose and front wing of the new AMR24 as some of the most obvious tweaks to the car’s design, but insists that there are plenty of other innovations that have been brought forward in the bodywork.
“We’ve made adjustments throughout the car,” he said. “It’s very different in many ways – most of it has changed. “
“But it’s a strong evolution from last year’s car. So we built on the finish of the AMR23. “
“There are some obvious things that are different, like the nose and the front wing, but the bodywork will be different. There’s also a lot of obvious stuff under the hood, but clearly we’re going to check to stay somewhere. “below deck.
“The front suspension layout is a similar layout to what we had on a AMR23 — a push rod system — and we’ve inherited new rear suspension from Mercedes. They obviously give us the gearbox and the structure of the rear suspension, so that has changed slightly from last year as well.
“So the back was replaced, but the front is very similar. “