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The whole idea of Formula 1’s budget cap era is that teams cannot just throw money at going quickly. It’s about rewarding the smartest solutions and the best processes.
There was a time not that long ago that ‘Team Silverstone’ was the gold standard in this area, always punching above its weight. Now, in its Aston Martin guise, the often-repeated message is that the intention is to punch harder with its added resources.
The big risk as Aston Martin expanded was that it would lose the inherent efficiency that made its past iterations – Force India in particular – so good.
Because Force India’s great strength was driven by its big weakness. In its case, to butcher a phrase, necessity was the mother of (very carefully chosen) innovation.
With greater resources, perhaps the pressure to be quite so efficient would disappear. Aston Martin insists that is not the case. Especially as the budget cap means there is an enforced limit to its own expansion. And within that, Aston Martin has the flexibility to tailor its growth to maximise the regulations.
“We’re a team who’s going up to the budget cap as opposed to coming down from being way over it,” explains performance director Tom McCullough. “But it’s still very much a factor for ourselves.
“In the past, as a team, we’ve had to make a lot of decisions on performance updates relative to cost.
“That’s when we had no money to be able to make the bits or at least you having to justify the bits to make them.
“So it’s sort of, in a way, the same challenge really now. It’s how much? What do you need to change? What is the bang for buck? How much performance are you going to bring?
“When you’ve got an update, you always want to get the bits on the car to have a faster car and start scoring the points, more points sooner.
“But if you can wait one race and get a significant gain, then it sometimes does make sense from a cost side of things now to to wait that extra race.
“A lot of that comes from when you’re in the windtunnel or the CFD development tools, if you think that you’re still on quite a steep gradient of performance.
“Rather than just stopping a certain part and then getting it made, if you think another week in the windtunnel you’re going to get quite a bit more from it, then it’s going to be more of a factor now than it has been in the past.
“Because ultimately now we can’t spend money we don’t have within the cost cap.”
Aston Martin has a potentially significant new ally in this endeavour.
Major partnerships in F1 are about more than just exchanging stickers on the car for a chunk of cash. There are lots of different kinds of alliances around the place – up and down the grid there are deals relating to technical resources, simulation, financing, merchandising, corporate sustainability. Pretty much anything.
One of Aston Martin’s main backers is Cognizant, its new-for-2021 title partner, and that falls into the bracket of ‘sponsorship with a practical use’. Some Cognizant staff have even joined the Aston Martin F1 team on secondment and are working from its factory.
“They’re working actually throughout the company in so many areas, but from the performance group side, the data science and software side of things, they really understand what we do with all our data,” says McCullough.
“And how we post process it, how we store it, how we visualise it, how we interpret the data.
“The whole data science, AI and machine learning side of things is obviously one of their specialties, and it’s something over the last few years that we’ve been getting more and more into.
“But their ability to get into that is huge compared to ours because of the resource that they have and the experience and understanding that they have.
“So it’s just about communicating with their engineers, there’s a lot of online meetings, and even people working at the factory, just getting them to understand what we’re doing and use their skillset to help us just be more efficient.
“Talking about the cost cap, processing data and visualising data, when our jobs are all about data, is just so important. And that’s largely where they’re getting more and more involved with us.”
In the broadest possible terms, expansive and efficient data science could be extremely valuable in an era that puts a fixed cap on spending.
Whether a new partner is a small link in the chain or a game-changing ally, the hope is it can revive what was once such a potent strength for ‘Team Silverstone’.
Especially as it has more headroom than rival teams at the moment, because as McCullough said it is working its way up to the cost cap. While it can hire new people and invest in new areas that are tailored to the spending limit, F1’s biggest teams are cutting back. They are doing their own deals and emphasising the efficiency of their organisations as well, but in a different way.
“That is an ever evolving situation,” says McCullough of confronting the realities of the budget cap and the advantage something like the Cognizant partnership could give Aston Martin.
“When the relationship started, a year ago, we were a long way from that being on our radar. Or it was on our radar but it wasn’t a concern.
“But over the last 12 months and in the next 12-24 months, all those compromises or those discussions are going to get more and more important.
“Because it’s all about bang for buck – more so than it ever has been.”
