Have you ever wondered how a Formula 1 car is built? The Aston Martin F1 team and its strategic partner Aramco may have the answers you’ve been looking for.
Aston Martin and Aramco have released a video detailing the team’s preparation and construction of its AMR23 cars, one of which finished on the podium in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix with two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso at the wheel.
Compiling an F1 car is an incredibly complicated procedure with more than 13,000 individual components needing to be assembled by a highly trained group of mechanics and engineers.
F1 teams face a high-pressure race against time before the start of every season to ensure their new designs are ready in time for the car launch, pre-season testing and the opening race of the year.
While the process is usually completed just days before those events, it begins well over a year before that, with the design of the 2023 car starting even before the first race of 2022 has taken place.
Over 700 people at Aston Martin were involved in the design and assembly of this year’s AMR23.
The video features insight from the head of building and car assembly Mark Gray and Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack as well as the likes of technical director Dan Fallows and the team’s new driver Alonso.
Gray details the “high-stress” process of constructing three AMR23s before the start of the season which begins with the attachment of the fuel cell to the bare chassis behind where the driver sits.
The front suspension – including all of the wishbones and uprights – is fitted to the car with all the attached complex electronics like the sensors.
This is followed by the engine, radiators, cooling systems of the car and the rear end of the car, which is fitted to the engine.
Once the build is complete the team starts the fire-up process to “make the car come alive before we put it on the track” in the words of Gray – something Aston Martin did five days before the team’s 2023 launch.
One day prior to the fire-up, Aston Martin was testing at Jerez with Alonso in the 2022 Aston Martin – a chance for the driver and team to reacclimatise after the winter break.
The team’s AMR23 then successfully executed the fire-up process and it was ready to be shown to the world at the launch event, just over a week before the team participated in the sole 2023 pre-season test in Bahrain.
After a successful three days of testing in Bahrain, Aston Martin was ready for the 2023 season-opener one week later where it would challenge at the front of the field and Alonso walked away with a podium finish.
Alonso’s sensational third-place finish was the accumulation of over a year of work completed by a team of over 700 people in a highly specific and fascinating way as shown in Aston Martin and Aramco’s video.
