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Aston Martin chief technical officer Andy Green said that what he called the team’s de facto ‘early season’ updates introduced in Friday practice at Silverstone, which will be the last significant upgrade it brings in the 2022 Formula 1 season, showed real promise despite Sebastian Vettel’s car suffering a floor problem.
Green described the major upgrade introduced for the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona as a “launch car” given the scale of the changes. Using the same metaphor, that made this new package, which includes a new floor and modified beam wing among other detail changes, effectively the early-season upgrade.
It wasn’t a straightforward day, with just 10 laps in total completed in the rain-hit first free practice session. That ended with Lance Stroll firing the car into the gravel at Copse, causing a session-ending red flag.
A few cars emerge onto the track including Lance Stroll, but the Canadian spins off into the gravel.
He's stuck. Out comes the red flag, and FP1 is brought to an end a couple of minutes early.#BritishGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/Nocss32ezW
— Formula 1 (@F1) July 1, 2022
In dry conditions in the afternoon, Stroll was the lead Aston Martin in 10th place, exactly one second off pacesetter Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari, while Vettel was just over a tenth slower in 12th.
But with Vettel suffering a structural problem in the floor that can be easily fixed before he unleashed his full pace on softs and both drivers feeling confident, the belief is that the package worked well.
“It shows promise,” Green told the Race. “The drivers, when they were running, were encouraged.
“We had a weakness in the floor structure, which we’ve got to repair overnight, which is why we had to stop Seb’s car. Actually, the floor had failed by the time we got onto the soft tyres.
“So the fact that both drivers were comfortable with the car shows its promise.”
Vettel described his first day in the car as “a little frustrating” while Stroll said “my first experience of the upgrades was positive” and is expecting more on Saturday with further set-up optimisation.
Green characterised this package as an iteration of the Barcelona specification, which has shown genuine pace since it was introduced even though, Vettel’s sixth place in Baku aside, the results have been modest.
“It’s just another iteration of it,” said Green when asked about the extent of the changes to the Barcelona specification.
“When you take a new concept, like we did in Barcelona, it’s quite raw, it’s quite young. It’s like our launch car, so this would be our early season upgrades, as it were.
“Most areas bar the front wing have got some sort of change to it. It’s all quite subtle, but it all adds up.”
Green also confirmed that this would be Aston Martin’s last significant upgrade thanks to a combination of the constraints of the cost cap and the need to move the focus onto its 2023 car.
While there may be some small changes if necessary, there will not be big changes to the car for the rest of the year.
“I think when this rattles out, once we’ve got up to the amount of spares that we need, yes,” he said when asked if this would be the last significant upgrade.
“And we’re moving to ’23 now. There might be some little things we might be able to do but there won’t be any major changes to the big structural parts.”
