At Barcelona, Fernando Alonso celebrated his first points of the season in front of his home crowd. The Spaniard managed to capitalize on the potential of the Aston Martin, whose performance took a leap forward with the updates introduced in mid-May at Imola. The Emilia Romagna package represents a milestone in the history of the Silverstone team, being the first to be tested in the new team-owned wind tunnel.
The problem of the two clocks
The updates introduced in Italy affected several areas of the AMR25. From top to bottom, Aston Martin removed the vortex generators originally located above the rear halo mounting points, although the most obvious change concerns the shape of the sidepods. These modifications aim to shield the car from harmful turbulence coming from the front wheels, working in synergy with the floor upgrades. Aside from the tweak to the side edge, the most important updates are hidden, involving the volumes of the Venturi tunnels, the arrangement of the flow conditioners, and the diffuser, which interacts with a renewed beam wing.
In Aston Martin’s case, the saying that the most relevant updates are the ones you don’t see applies not only to the car but also to the factory. While the package was still developed partially in the old wind tunnel, the Imola upgrade is the first fully mapped in the new facility. The team didn’t want to rush, preferring to take all the time needed to correlate the two wind tunnels, a long and difficult process that Team Principal Andy Cowell compared to reading the exact time from two different clocks.
Short- and medium-term advantages
The quality of the new package is demonstrated by the encouraging performances immediately shown by the AMR25. Between Imola, Monaco, and Barcelona, Fernando Alonso reached Q3 on all three occasions, then converted that into a 9th place on Sunday at his home race. The car felt livelier in slow corners, where previously it tended to lose momentum, but it still suffers from excessive aerodynamic drag on the straights. This is a double problem because, besides costing lap time, it prevents the drivers from overtaking and escaping traffic, thus stopping them from running in clean air and showing their true race pace.
However, the importance of the Imola package goes beyond the 2025 championship. Seeing the effectiveness of the updates on track builds confidence within the team, whose priority, according to Andy Cowell, is to rely on a wind tunnel and simulation tools that are trustworthy and well correlated to real-world conditions. Hence the team’s intention not to prematurely halt development despite the upcoming regulation changes, with the AMR25 becoming an engineering test bench to train for becoming the top team Aston Martin aspires to be.
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