Aston Martin Technical Director Dan Fallows has explained the team’s latest updates at the Hungarian Grand Prix will bid to make its Formula 1 car “more consistent”.
The Silverstone-based squad started the current campaign where it concluded the previous term in the pecking order behind Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes.
However, Aston Martin’s strive to eradicate the gap to the leading quartet with upgrades at Imola came undone as the team has since regressed towards the midfield.
Fernando Alonso’s uncharacteristic errors on the weekend when those new parts debuted prompted Aston Martin to concede its car was now “more difficult to drive”.
Aston Martin has now introduced another comprehensive upgrade package, which comprises multiple revisions to the AMR24’s floor among its seven updated parts.
“Yeah, so some of it is our kind of normal iterative development,” Fallows explained. “We like to bring things to most races we can.
“We’ve got a lot of people doing a huge amount of work to try and add performance to the car as we go along.
“But there’s no secret that we do have some characteristics of the car we’re not particularly happy with. We want to make the car much more consistent.
“We’ve seen that we have glimmers of good performance, whether that is in some conditions, some with tyres or in qualifying. But it’s that consistency.
“We don’t seem to be able to get that at the variety of circuits.
“And the drivers are very clear about what it is they need, what it is they want. So we’re on a constant quest to try and bring these things to help them out.”
Fallows would not be drawn on whether Aston Martin had gathered an entire grasp on the reasons behind the Imola components creating unintended consequences.
The ex-Red Bull designer has reiterated that moulding the AMR24 into a more compliant car to drive will deliver a time increase as much as the upgrades themselves.
“It’s been something that we’ve all been working on very hard, the people back in the factory have been working flat out to get this upgrade here,” he added.
“It’s been an incredible effort to get the package that we’ve got here today, which is again all about just trying to improve that consistency, the adaptability, the ability to set the car up in these different conditions and still get a similar performance, similar result.
“We want to make sure that the drivers, when they get corner to corner, they have that consistency, that confidence in the car, because that confidence is worth so much lap time and that’s really what we’ve been focusing on.”
Aston Martin hasn’t been alone in bolting on updates in 2024 and enduring an unexpected regression, with Ferrari and RB both experiencing setbacks in recent times.
“Well, it’s a complex interaction with not only just with the aerodynamics but the way that works with the suspension that’s very complicated,” Fallows explained.
“Also the floors… they’re very sensitive in terms of the way they behave.
“The aerodynamics under the floor is very sensitive to ride height and some conditions so getting that right is a tricky balance.
“The other thing is we’re all trying to drive more performance into the cars and sometimes you may achieve nine things that you want to do and then it’s the 10th thing that trips you up.
“So we’re really trying to make sure that every time we put something on the car it does exactly what we want in every condition, but sometimes that doesn’t always work out like that.”
Fallows has insisted that Aston Martin’s ambition this weekend will be to get an accurate gauge of whether the upgrades correlate with what the team is anticipating.
But he’s conceded that the contrast in track characteristics between the Hungaroring and Spa-Francorchamps will mean it takes more rounds to get a complete read.
“They’re very different circuits in terms of their behaviour, but we can learn a great deal here,” he said regarding the upcoming two rounds.
“It’s all about making sure that we do get what we were expecting to get. That’s obviously a big tick in the box if you can go and say that.
“But also the demands of a circuit like Spa are very different so it doesn’t necessarily mean that even if the car does suit this environment that it will be necessarily good there.”
