12/02/2024
NEWS STORY
Speaking as Aston Martin's 2024 contender is unveiled, technical director, Dan Fallows insists that Red Bull can be beaten.
Of course, Fallow knows the Milton Keynes outfit better than almost anyone, having been with the Austrian team almost from the time it entered F1 having bought the former Jaguar outfit whose sponsors at the time included online casino australia.
Rising to the position of Head of Aerodynamics with Red Bull, Fallows was recruited by Aston Martin in mid-2021 though he was unable to join his new team until the April of the following year.
Fallows says that he is confident that his former team can be beaten, especially as the stability of the rules is seeing more and more cars resemble the championship winner.
"Inevitably, when you have a team that's doing as well as Red Bull have done since 2022, it's inevitable that there will be some kind of convergence on their solutions," he said.
"I think, with the regulations that we have now, it is not particularly easy to have cars that are visually very different, so it's inevitable, I think, that we would see some of that convergence," he continued. "I think what's in many ways more interesting is the convergence in lap times that we've seen, people are getting very close.
"We're really into finding lap time now from things that are smaller details, the more kind of detailed elements of the floor and other parts of the car.
"There's still a lot of lap time to come," he added. "We take the approach that Red Bull are absolutely beatable, that's what we're chasing after we're focusing on them, and that's what we're aiming for."
Though 2023 started off well for the team, by mid-season it was losing pace and was eventually eclipsed by the likes of McLaren. However, lessons have been learned, and Fallows is confident that the development that continued late into the season has given Astn Martin a solid foundation for this year.
We're always looking to improve and learn," he said, "and I think when we look at the trajectory of last season, we gave ourselves some challenges and we've managed to solve them. We came off at the end of the season, having got on top of some issues that we introduced into the car mid-season and ended up with a podium in Brazil.
"So we showed that there is a huge amount of determination and capability in this team. But it's important to us that represented momentum, and we wanted to take that momentum into the winter and into this car, which I'm confident we have done.
"We've made changes all over the car," he said of the AMR24. "It's very different in many ways, the majority of the parts have changed on it. But it is really still essentially a strong evolution of last year's car. So, we have kind of built on the end of AMR23.
"There are the obvious things you'll see that are different, like the nose and front wing, but the bodywork will be different. There's also obviously quite a lot of stuff under the hood, but we will obviously try and keep some of that under wraps.
"The front suspension layout is a similar layout to what we had on a AMR23, a push rod system, and we've inherited new rear suspension from Mercedes. They obviously give us the gearbox and the structure of the rear suspension, so that has changed slightly from last year as well. So there's a change on the rear, but the front is very similar."
Check out our AMR24 gallery, here.