Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso believes that teams in Formula 1 have reached the limit with the current rules whereby they risk encountering drivability issues by chasing downforce gains.
2025 is the final year of the current rules cycle, but teams already had trouble up and down the grid developing cars last year.
One case was Red Bull, which started the year with the strongest package, but in an effort to upgrade its RB20, encountered a world of pain with balance issues.
Aston Martin was another team that struggled massively with development in 2024, having started the season clipping at the heels of the top teams.
But an upgrade delivered at Imola hampered the AMR24 with drivability issues and sent Aston Martin tumbling down a season-long road of development issues and performance concerns.
Alonso admits that trying to add further downforce measures on this year’s AMR25 runs the risk of drivability issues, but hints to the fact Aston Martin has the tools in place to implement upgrades successfully.
“I think we arrived at a point in the development of the car that is quite tricky to add downforce without adding some difficulty on driving the car,” the Spaniard told select media including Motorsport Week.
“But we are quite okay with the correlation and things.”
No doubt Aston Martin will benefit from its new state-of-the-art wind tunnel that will help combat correlation issues down the road.
Adrian Newey explains limitations of current F1 rules
F1’s present ground effect era differs from the technical revolution imposed on the sport in the late 1970s and early 80s, whereby skirts effectively sealed the underside of the car to create the desired negative pressure to add downforce.
Before starting life at Aston Martin as Managing Technical Partner, Adrian Newey explained to Auto Motor und Sport why the current ground effect rules have limitations.
The legendary designer said “It’s in the nature of things. A ground-effect car without side-sealing skirts like in the 80s will always be prone to instability.
“You’re looking for more and more vacuum under the car, but you’re always struggling with leakage from the side,” he added.
“This generates downforce losses here and there, which are all the greater the lower your car sits.”
Aston Martin making progress after dismal 2024
Aston Martin’s development headaches in 2024 led to a series of painful lessons from race to race as the Silverstone-based outfit gained more and more data on what wasn’t working.
After two days of pre-season testing, Alonso acknowledged that those lessons are starting to pay dividends as the Spaniard noted improvement on the AMR25.
“I think we have some positives in the car,” he said.
“We’re not going into the details but obviously the data and the correlation seems good and there is a step forward compared to last year’s car.
“And there are some negatives as well, like probably all the things that we need to fix and get better for Australia for later in the season.
“So, we are relatively happy knowing that it’s extremely tight in the midfield and we will have to do perfect weekends if we want to score points.
“But this maybe was not a surprise and we will try to get better throughout the season.”
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