One of the big themes of the 2023 season was the functioning of Red Bull's DRS, an aspect for which each team found its own explanation by observing the characteristics of the RB19. In fact, on several occasions, the car from Milton Keynes demonstrated that it had an edge with the mobile wing wide open, with an advantage that clearly varied from track to track.
On several occasions during the world championship Red Bull decided to mount a more powerful wing than its rivals, so much so that, in closed DRS conditions, we often saw faster cars on the sprints. An example was seen in Las Vegas, an event in which Max Verstappen decided to make a last-second change to the setup before qualifying, opting for a lighter wing that he had not yet tried over the weekend.
Over the course of the season, several teams tried to understand the secrets of the DRS Red Bull, also bringing rear wings very similar to those already seen on the RB19. Among these there is also Aston Martin, which already in Azerbaijan had decided to debut a low-load wing with features similar to those of the Milton Keynes team.
Photo by: Uncredited
The Aston Martin wing in Baku
The team directed by Mike Krack had in fact arrived from several events in which, thanks to the choices made in terms of rear wings, they had experienced a rather significant gap on the straights, knowing they had to work on reducing resistance to progress. During qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix, Alonso had recorded a top speed approximately 6 km/h lower than that of the Red Bull, while in Saudi Arabia, thanks to the different choices in terms of load, that gap had even increased: 10 km /h on the main straight, 13 on the opposite stretch. An issue that also weighed on McLaren during the season, especially on the low-load packages, on which it was forced to use old wings that had not been optimized for the more recent packages updated during the world championship.
“We noticed that last year Red Bull was very strong in this field, so they took the upper hand. I remember in Jeddah last year it was the first time everyone said: 'Wow, the advantage they got to the rather large DRS opening,'” said McCullough, Aston Martin's chief technical officer.
“The interaction between the entire rear of the car and the load on the diffuser, the beam wing, the rear wing, the mainplane, the flap, the brake ducts, the interweaving of all these elements is obviously very different than the previous generation cars. And get a stable aerodynamic platform that doesn't have porpoising and all the other things that we don't want, which is to get a lot of downforce, but make sure that when you open the DRS you have as wide a range as possible , that's the goal. At the beginning we didn't have a particularly effective DRS and we just systematically developed it to improve it while trying to maintain stability.”
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
Technical detail of the Red Bull Racing RB19
During the championship the Silverstone team continued to work on this aspect, even if the work had to add to the problems deriving from incorrect development which forced the team to take a step back in the final part of the season, abandoning the new fund that had been introduced in Austin. Aston tried to describe it as an experiment, given that some features actually took up solutions that had already been seen on their opponents' cars.
However, despite the general step backwards at cross-country level, there was no shortage of innovations until the last round of the year, where the British team introduced a newly modified rear wing, also in this case taking inspiration from ideas seen on other cars, including McLaren and Red Bull itself. In fact, in Abu Dhabi we saw a redesigned wing, which also led to reviewing some details of the functioning of the lower beam wing, designed to work better with the updated version of the rear package. In addition to the modified flap, the engineers also worked on the lateral supports that connect it to the endplate, with a totally different shape from the previous one to further improve its efficiency.
McCullough explained how intervening to increase the effectiveness of the DRS was anything but simple: “All these elements of the rear axle are connected. Not much can be done within the regulations. You always try to produce load and not have too much aerodynamic drag”.
Photo by: Filip Cleeren
The rear wing of the Aston Martin AMR23
“But then, to get a significant advantage of the DRS and make all these things work well, it's a challenge for the aerodynamics departments. And that's why we've seen a lot of development in this area, not just from ours, but also by other rivals”.
Regarding the wing tested in Abu Dhabi, Aston Martin's technical manager explained above all how important it was to test it already this year to have a direct comparison with the CFD and wind tunnel data, given that that solution will also be useful for next season: “It was important for us to fit it on the car at the end of this year to correlate what we see in the wind tunnel and in the CFD, and we've done some comparisons between the cars and the sessions, and the wing performs well “.
An important element, because on several occasions Fernando Alonso has complained about the poor top speed as one of the most important limitations of the AMR23: “Sand we will be able to improve straight line speed, I think this has been, in terms of performance, our weak point. Always a little too slow on the straights. To be as quick as the others, we had to remove too much load on the rear wing, so we ended up being slow even when cornering.”
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