“I can’t trust myself, because everything will change next year“: these were the words of a “very happy” Fernando Alonso after completing 97 laps with the Aston Martin in the Abu Dhabi test this Tuesday.
“The feeling I had today in the garage with the boys and the potential of the team, the talent I see in the engineering room here is exceptional. I am very, very, very happy right now”, explained the double world champion of Formula 1which according to him is “optimistic to more than 100%”.
In the second half of the season the upward trend of Aston Martinwhich despite finishing seventh in the Constructors’ World Championship tied on points with alfa romeotheir level is clearly higher than that of Italians and almost equal to that of Alpine Y McLaren.
This development is a small sample of what is to come in 2023… and both Alonso himself and the heads of the Silverstone team are already warning him.
Tom McCulloughthe team’s technical director, explained in statements to ‘Ace’ how the project has evolved this season.
“Changed a lot since February. We suffer a lot with ‘porpoising’. In Miami there was a good race pace, but we already made the decision to introduce a different design philosophy“, it states.
“Two ideas coexisted in the wind tunnel. That made us go with the wrong foot, we lost the first months. But from there, a much wider operating window and fewer limitations were unlocked. We went from fighting at the back of the middle zone to the true half”, he adds.
Of course, for months they have only been thinking about making an AMR23 capable of fighting for the podium: “We have been 100% focused for several months. There are common areas in development because the lessons we learn this year have to be translated into next year’s car.”
“It’s a balance, we want to do a lot of development to solve the problems, but with the spending ceiling that’s limited, so we prioritize the areas in which we want to learn more, which are the flat bottom, the diffuser, the ends of the flat bottomis where we have put more money to help, maybe not to be faster this year but to learn for the next one”, added McCullough.
Among the statements by Fernando Alonso pointing out that the car will be completely different from this year and those of the technical director of Aston Martin, it can be sensed that the British team has something on their hands… we’ll see what.