DAN FALLOWS: “THIS IS OUR BIGGEST UPDATE YET”
For the first European race of the season, the AMR24 features a new front wing, nose, bottom and bottom edges, diffuser, engine cover and rear suspension fairings.
Although Aston Martin has already brought several packages this season – for example, at Suzuka – Fallows admitted that this weekend’s series of updates was the most significant so far. “ Yeah, she’s pretty aggressive,” he said. “ We knew we had a car with which we would have many opportunities. At the start of the season, we wanted to make sure we had continuous updates coming. So this is probably our biggest to date. But it is only part of our plan, and we want to continue on this path also in the next races ”.
WORK ON SPECIFIC AREAS
Fallows says the updates were initiated after testing in Bahrain, rather than as a result of the car’s performance in the early events, when the car performed better in qualifying than in the race.
“I think most of this update is based on what we saw from the launch car, from the car being tested, and then how we wanted to evolve it,” he said. “We have seen that some circuits suit our car better than others. And something that we’ve been focusing on, trying to make sure that we can express ourselves well wherever, whenever we need to. It’s a generic thing, we try to make the car more competitive. There are areas where we can see where we need to make specific improvements. So we definitely worked on those .”
OBJECTIVE: TO MAKE THE AMR24 MORE COMPETITIVE ON EVERY TYPE OF CIRCUIT
Fallows said it was crucial to ensure the AMR24 was competitive on different track types and on a range of faster and slower corners. “We have an era of ground-effect cars that have specific windows of performance that you’re always trying to broaden,” he said. “ And you want to make sure that when you bring an upgrade it works in all different conditions. I think we’re all chasing the same thing, really .”
Expanding on the search for consistency, he said: “ I think we’ve seen that on some circuits, in some conditions, we’re better than other times. And it’s obviously something that we look at closely to try to make sure that, when we develop a car in the future, we try to iron out those differences. I think everyone is working very hard to try to understand when we best extract our performance, to add it in the right way. I think that’s the key thing for us .”
THE MISTAKES AND LESSONS OF 2023
Fallow admitted that, at times, last year’s updates brought by Aston Martin did not work exactly as intended and that it is important to ensure they work as intended.
“Whenever you bring an update, obviously you want to put it directly on the machine and see that it does exactly what you expect,” he said. “But there are different ways of looking at the data, and obviously different things that might be slightly unexpected once you put the updates on the machine. We’ve learned something in some areas; we’ve realized that where we can we can push things harder than we could before. And there are some things we need to be a little more careful about. It was a learning experience. I think we have a little more confidence now that these updates are working. We’ll see today, but there was a lot of hard work trying to figure it out.
