The reduced gap between Red Bull and Mercedes in the races this year shows that high-rake cars were the least injured by the new Formula 1 aero rules, says Aston Martin.
While Lewis Hamilton has won two of the races in this campaign with a low-rake concept so far, his Mercedes team has been led by Red Bull nearby at all three events.
That contrast between being close to Red Bull this season and 12 months ago shows how much the soil changes have affected things in 2021, believes Aston Martin team principal Otston Szafnauer.
“If you just watch the last race without that [final] When it came to pit stops, Lewis was 34 seconds ahead of Max at last year’s Portimao, “said Szafnauer.” And if they hadn’t had the pit stops to set the fastest lap in the end, it was four seconds this year.
“So that you [Mercedes] lost 30 seconds in a race against a Red Bull. And so do we, if you look at our times when we finished, we too were about 30 seconds behind where we were last year. So just look at the first three races and see both qualifying and race results. “
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Aston Martin has held discussions with the FIA for the past few weeks to gain a better understanding of the control process and the motivation for changing floors.
Szafnauer said he was at least glad the team got some responses.
“We had good conversations with the FIA to understand the process and how we got to where we were,” he said.
“The discussions are almost over and I think we have made good progress to better understand what happened.”
Szafnauer announced that his team was informed last summer about how the ground changes would hurt the low-rake cars on some wind tunnel back-to-back tests.
“We had developed a high-rake car for many, many years since the high-rake concept started with a blown floor, and we are the only ones switching from a high-rake philosophy to a low-rake.
“So we have the ability to use both CFD and tunneling to internally examine the experience of both and determine whether this is more damaging to one philosophy than the other.” That’s exactly what we did.
“It’s exactly what we touched on last August and I think it turned out to be right.”
Szafnauer said three teams were against the ground changes and made their discomfort clear in a preliminary vote in the Technical Advisory Board.
With the FIA enforcing the changes to the regulations for safety reasons, there was no way for Aston Martin to stop the new regulations.
Szafnauer said Aston Martin suggested that the F1 consider an alternative to changing the floor, but this was not accepted.
“We suggested not making the second change because the changes were made one at a time,” he said.
“We thought the first change was enough to slow the cars down, so we suggested just leaving them there.
“But there were other solutions that were suggested, and not by us, but early on.
“I’ll give you an example of reducing the size of the rear wing and that would have affected everyone equally. But that was not chosen.”
When asked if Aston Martin could have done anything else, Szafnauer said: “I don’t think so. We pointed it out at the time, and when the rules were written and accepted, we did [just had to] work hard to regain all the downforce we’ve lost. “
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