F1 | Aston Martin: flared belly and gillless bazooka

Aston Martin started the 2024 season on the right foot: Fernando Alonso on the morning of the first day of collective testing not only placed third in the time table behind Max Verstappen's Red Bull and Charles Leclerc's Ferrari, but he was the driver who traveled the furthest. With the AMR24 the Spaniard covered 77 laps of the Sakhir track, putting together a distance of almost one and a half GPs.

The feeling, therefore, is that the “verdona” is a well-born car which, as soon as it was put on the track, immediately showed very interesting potential: compared to the car seen at the presentation, we were able to observe a first important change in the belly which demonstrates a certain refinement in the project curated by Dan Fallows and Luca Furbatto.

At the end of the side, in fact, the Silverstone technicians have already brought a significant update which says a lot about the accuracy of the design of the belly in the attempt to manage the extremity vortices: the wing shape of the belly, seen from the side, is now flared in the section in which the slide descends towards the bottom. It is clear the attempt to increase the air flow in what can be defined as the “double bottom” of the Aston Martin in search of greater efficiency of the bottom pavement.

The image of Giorgio Piola it is also interesting because it highlights another characteristic aspect of the “verdona”: the bazooka for evacuating the hot air from the Mercedes power unit is the only one on the grill that does not have gills along its surface, venting only at the tail.

Aston Martin AMR24: the crash wing has reappeared in the rear

Photo by: Giorgio Piola

At the rear, however, we saw the small crash wing reappear, the solution that had appeared at the end of last year and which had immediately disappeared due to the jack that promptly ruined it as soon as the single-seater had to be lifted. Aston Martin engineers modified the lift so it was possible to use the profile without there being the risk of breaking it the first time it was used on the track.