Aston Martin technical director Dan Fallows has confirmed the team will be taking a “very aggressive” development path for 2023, after their late-season recovery in 2022.
The Silverstone-based team started the year on the back foot by their standards, having sat ninth in the Constructors’ Championship for large parts of the season after beginning 2022 with only seven points from as many races.
This led to a radical change of design philosophy in the car when they brought a new package to Barcelona in particular, which raised suspicions and a subsequent protest about their newfound similarities to the front-running Red Bull car – but Aston Martin were cleared of any wrongdoing over ‘copying’ accusations leveled at them.
Their performance steadily improved as the season went on though, eventually ending the year level on points with Alfa Romeo for sixth in the standings, though Alfa earned P6 on countback owing to Valtteri Bottas’ season-high fifth-place finish at Imola.
Despite narrowly missing out on an extra place in the constructors’ table, Aston Martin have taken heart from how their season panned out, and technical director Fallows believes the team are heading in the right direction.
“I think it’s been a big, big factor in building our confidence for next year,” Fallows told select media including PlanetF1.com about the team’s recovery in 2022.
“We clearly started the year with a car that wasn’t where we wanted it to be, and we have shown that development, particularly in the second half of the season.
“We’ve really demonstrated that this kind of design principles that we put in place, and some of the philosophies that we’re adopting, are paying off – they are they are going to show dividends.
“So what we’re trying to do for next year is to take a very aggressive development strategy, but build on those lessons we’ve learned this year.”
Fernando Alonso has now officially moved across from Alpine to become an Aston Martin driver in time for the 2023 season, and the double World Champion has predicted “good times are coming” for his new team.
The Spaniard took part in post-season testing for Aston Martin in Abu Dhabi, where he was able to get to grips with the AMR22 and weigh in with his thoughts on where to move forward.
The team has replaced experience with even more experience in bringing Alonso in for the retiring Sebastian Vettel, and Fallows stressed the importance of having a driver pairing which can offer their thoughts concisely to help the team.
“From a technical perspective, it’s important that we have drivers who are able to give good feedback – I don’t say positive feedback, because that’s not always the case – but good feedback, and is able to describe how they’re feeling in the car That is very important for us,” he explained.
“We are very fortunate, and Lance [Stroll] is very good in that respect as well. I don’t think by Seb leaving that we were kind of missing anything particularly, but we do want to produce a car which is significantly better for next year.
“We want to see that sort of progression and we need to make sure we have drivers who are able to extract the most out of that, because I think in Lance we have a driver who is able to drive a car and clearly Fernando has a huge amount of experience, and there’s a proven track record of doing that as well. So it’s a very exciting driver line-up.”
read more: 10 storylines to be excited about ahead of the new F1 2023 season
