F1 | Aston: filming day to study new features for relaunch

Over the weekend in Great Britain, Aston Martin finally returned to the top 10 with a convincing performance, even though it was not the reference car in the midfield during the weekend, thanks to a Haas capable of imposing itself on the fast corners of Silverstone thanks to the latest innovations and an excellent Nico Hulkenberg.

A result that came in a complicated period for Aston Martin on the technical front, especially after the updates brought to Emilia-Romagna had not given the hoped-for results. According to the drivers, in fact, that package, designed with the aim of adding downforce, had made the single-seater even more unstable and difficult to drive, similar to what had already happened last year, when the team worked a lot on the aerodynamics but affected the balance of the car.

As a result, Aston Martin only managed to score points in two of the next five races, with a double points finish in Canada achieved in changeable weather conditions, just like at Silverstone. However, the British top 10 has a different flavour to the previous ones, because at its base, according to the team, there would also be a work of understanding the car born from the numerous experiments conducted in recent weeks and which have found further confirmation after the problems seen in Spain and Austria.

At Silverstone the team introduced a new front wing, with the central part of the mainplane more pronounced and closer to the asphalt, and reworked the aerodynamics around the rear brake ducts. However, one of the most important changes was the step back on the floor to a previous specification, namely the one introduced at Suzuka, which gave the car a more consistent and stable behavior despite giving up, at least on paper, higher load peaks. A reasoning that recalls that of Ferrari at Silverstone, which gave up the latest package of innovations, potentially more advanced in terms of load, returning to the solutions introduced at Imola to find greater stability on the fast corners.

If a step back was taken at Silverstone, this does not mean that development has stopped. In fact, on Friday Aston Martin took to the track again on the track just a few kilometers from the factory for the second and final filming day of the season. At the wheel of the AMR24 was Nick Yelloly, who has been working on the team’s simulator for years (and is also part of the BMW Hypercar project in the WEC) and who, over the years, has had the opportunity to take to the track with the team’s cars also in the test sessions dedicated to rookies in Abu Dhabi.

Yelloly was able to cover the canonical 200 kilometers allowed by the regulation, doubled this year compared to the past. However, the aspect that is worth focusing attention on is the fact that the AMR24 that took to the track for the day of filming was not the same one with which the team competed last week, but rather presented some new features, as could be seen from a video published by the team itself.

The solution thought up by Ferrari on the first version of the SF-24

Picture of: George Piola

The first is the flow conveyors placed on the external sides of the halo, which recall in shape those that Ferrari had developed on the first version of the SF-24 at the beginning of the year: after the elimination of the “bypass duct”, the Prancing Horse engineers revised that area with an element useful for cleaning the leaks around the cockpit area, but the Aston Martin version recalls precisely the one with which the SF-24 had debuted.

Previously, there was only a small, tilted diverter in that position on the AMR24 to generate additional downforce. This time the aim seems different, working closely with the horizontal profile at the end of the halo to manage the flows that run along the engine cover.

However, this does not seem to be the only area on which the Silverstone technicians have worked. Great attention seems to have been paid to the most advanced part of the bottom, located under the “tray” that divides the flow that ends up in the radiator mouth from that which is pushed into the lower part of the sidepods.

Over the last year, Aston Martin has worked continuously on the slide that originates in the upper area around the entrance to the venturi channels, a very sensitive area for the management of flows and turbulence. The same work has also been done on this new specification of the floor, with the step that has been redesigned and lengthened compared to the previous solution.

The two hundred kilometers of the filming day, with demo tires among other things, undoubtedly do not represent the best test bench to evaluate the updates, but they allow the engineers to collect the first real data to compare with those of the simulator. This is also usually done with tests at a constant pace, with different speed ranges, in order to have stable and precise references from the sensors scattered along the car. An opportunity to begin the study on the track while waiting for the new features to make their “official” debut in the coming weeks.