F1 News: Aston Martin's 2023 Story Is A Lesson For Mercedes

Mercedes is following in Aston Martin's footsteps.

Aston Martin made a huge decision last year to change their concept mid-season and to take inspiration from Red Bull's RB18 and their well-performing sidepods. Of course, there was a host of battles between the teams as they wondered how much of this was simply copying the RB18, especially after the Silverstone team had just taken a number of personnel from the Red Bulls.

Now, knowing what they went through to change their car's philosophy, the team's story acts as a lesson for Mercedes - who have just done a similar thing - with the looming cost cap. 

Mercedes put pen to paper and quickly wheeled out upgrades for the Monaco Grand Prix merely weeks ago. And with this bringing possible performance to the Spanish Grand Prix, they're now planning the next upgrade, but will likely struggle to bring a major change under the cost cap. 

“In the development phase of the ’22 car, we very much went two different routes and then one route we parked and another seemed to be really good,” Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough told the press.

“We then took the car to the track and the bouncing, porpoising was horrendous. We really tried to get on top of that porpoising, but everything we were doing wasn’t making big enough steps without losing too much performance.

“So we kept going down the route of losing a lot of performance to stop the porpoising, but we never seem to be able to do both.

“Then we went back to the other philosophy, which on paper was worse but when you put it to the car, the first time we ran it in Barcelona, we had no porpoising. And from then you started learning and tuning.

Aston Martin has since then become the second fastest team of the 2023 calendar, and have brought new upgrades to the Canadian Grand Prix poised for testing later today.

“It helped that we designed the car with two different regimes and layouts, the chassis was designed to accept both. We got a lot of data from both ways and we just accepted that what we’ve done, we couldn’t get on top of the porpoising so we had to switch.

“Pretty easy for us really, at that point, especially also because the car at the time, the Red Bull and a bit the Ferrari had gone that other philosophy and you see they’re competitive and not porpoising as badly. That also makes you think, let’s crack on with the idea.”

It was a surprise to see the AMR23 at the top of the grid, but fans were more than happy to see Fernando Alonso taking home podiums. 

“The philosophy started really in March last year and this car is an evolution of that philosophy,” McCullough continued.

“The car that we brought to Spain, that philosophy, has just been developed throughout last year, then again, continuing over the winter some quite big steps [were made] because during the year there’s only so much you can change because of cost cap.

“But we tried to give ourselves the freedom to keep developing the car. So when we’re designing the chassis, the floor, the radiator layout, the idea was to give ourselves the volume potential just to keep developing the car and so far that’s working pretty well.”