Aston Martin is fifth in the Constructors’ Championship. With three races to go in the 2024 Formula 1 season, Lawrence Stroll’s team is solidifying its position from 2023 in the team standings, but to simply look at the rankings would be a major illusion, because the reality is that the Silverstone team is finishing a very disappointing season.
Last year, at this time, Aston Martin had collected 236 points, including eight podiums (three second places and five third places, all with Fernando Alonso), while in 2024, the “green” team has gathered only 86 points, meaning a loss of around 150 points. In short, a real disaster.
The AMR24 has proven to be the wrong car, and despite efforts to find a valid development path, the expected results have not materialized. Fernando Alonso, who finished fourth in the drivers’ standings in 2023, has now slipped to ninth, with Lance Stroll in 13th.
Dan Fallows, the team’s technical director, has been removed from his role and reassigned to the production sector at the Gaydon facility. The 51-year-old Briton has been blamed for designing a car that was unresponsive to modifications, almost as if Dan, after a successful move to Silverstone in 2022, had exhausted all his ideas with the AMR23 last year and was now left with an empty “suitcase” of ideas brought from Red Bull.
The AMR23 missed a great opportunity to win the Monaco GP with the Spaniard, as the car was designed for “low speed,” making it highly competitive on slower circuits like the Principality. That green car perfectly managed the behavior of the Pirelli tires, finding a good operating window, which Fernando’s talent and experience helped to maximize.
Until the Canadian GP, where the first update was introduced, it seemed that Aston Martin could still harbor hopes of entering the battle with the top teams. However, from Montreal onward, that hope faded because the car, weak in top speed and with the DRS open, tried to limit its weaknesses but partially lost the ability to express its full potential.
Yet, Dan Fallows and the head of aerodynamics, Eric Blandin, aimed to develop a car for the AMR24 that would be competitive in “high speed,” meaning in fast corners and high-speed sections, following a path partially abandoned by McLaren, with the current MCL36 considered a universal car, while taking inspiration from Red Bull’s concepts.
The 2024 season, with the exacerbation of flexible front wings, favored the development of cars for low speeds, relying on highly deformable flaps to transfer downforce to the rear, which helped find good balance in fast corners. Aston Martin, however, failed to find this balance and persisted with work on the floor, producing six or seven evolutions that taxed the technical staff without yielding the expected satisfaction.
In fact, by focusing on the element that generates the most downforce on the car, the Fallows team may have neglected the development of the rear wing, which allowed many teams to make significant performance leaps by introducing solutions that increased downforce without penalizing drag efficiency.
It’s worth noting that Aston Martin is undergoing a revolution: what was once a mid-tier team now aims to become a top team by 2026. The expansion of the staff requires a revision of work processes, which intertwine with the state-of-the-art facility offering extraordinary growth opportunities such as the wind tunnel and the CFD system. Not to mention the exclusive partnership with Honda for power unit supply and with Aramco for e-fuel introduction. In this context, it must not be easy to continue car development while the company is fully focused on the future, aiming to fight for the world title.
Acquiring Adrian Newey, the technical genius of F1, and convincing Enrico Cardile to leave Ferrari, where he was born and raised, are significant moves that will give a major boost to Aston Martin’s growth: “Papa” Stroll has made two major technical acquisitions that demonstrate the team’s ambition to aim high.
However, between today’s disappointing results and the promising 2026, there will be a 2025 full of uncertainties: Dan Fallows has been sidelined, but Luca Furbatto, CTO of Silverstone, will oversee the mechanical aspects of the AMR25, while aerodynamics will remain in the hands of Blandin.
The goal? Take a step back: abandon the 2024 aero philosophy and return to the concepts of a car that, in its “low speed” version, sparked many hopes. And this could be the first restart…
Leave a Reply