The first Aston Martin Formula 1 car to be fully designed under Dan Fallows' technical leadership is aiming to be "years" ahead in its thinking. On Monday evening, the team took the covers off the AMR23 machine at their new Silverstone factory , with Fallows in charge of the project from conception to inception having joined from Red Bull in mid-2022 as Technical Director. It is a visual departure from the AMR22 that ended 2022, with Ferrari-esque sidepods and Red Bull-inspired inlets. New driver Fernando Alonso was confident the car would give the team a solid "baseline" with which to build - something Fallows echoed.
Aston thinking 'years' ahead
"We have adopted a reasonably aggressive approach to the rules, we want to try and imagine where the designs will be in months and years' time, so we can leapfrog the sort of normal development routes," Fallows explained when asked by RacingNews365.com about the radical nature of the car. "In terms of compromises, there's no doubt the regulations themselves are the hardest thing to get around. They are incredibly prescriptive. "We have a certain amount of freedom, and there's certainly enough to make some visual differences between the cars, but there will be some convergence in terms of designs. "There are a limited number of realistic solutions out there to these aerodynamic problems that we saw. "So in terms of compromises, it is dealing with those restrictions which are things that keep us up at night."
Needing a crystal ball
With the technical rules not set to undergo any significant overhauls until 2026, a period of stability and convergence is likely. With this in mind, Fallows says some of the development avenues designed in the car may be "fruitful in future." "One of the things that we looked at very early on in the design was not only to try and make a step on the launch car, but to give ourselves a really solid platform for development," he explained. "There are things which are perhaps a bit less obvious on the car which will allow us to push through these developments venues that we believe may be fruitful in the future. "So we have had an eye on where we think things are going to go, you have to have a little bit of a crystal ball for these things. "But having seen these rules for a couple of years now, we've sort of started to get a feeling for where the really key areas might be in the future. "That is what we've tried to bake into the design from the outset."
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