Aston Martin’s new B-spec car has been cleared by the FIA stating the team did not violate any rules despite its remarkable resemblance with Red Bull’s RB18. the Aston Martin does not violate any rules.
This comes as almost every Formula 1 team has made major upgrades with the exception of Haas and AlphaTauri for this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.
However, Aston Martin drew the attention of the paddock on Thursday when their upgraded car was spotted in the pit lane with sidepods and other elements that appear to be nearly identical to the Red Bull.
This is not the first time that the Silverstone-based squad has been investigated on ‘copying’ as they built their 2020 car based on Mercedes 2019 champion winning car which was later branded ‘Pink Mercedes.’ This brings up questions about how Aston has looked to have done the same with this year’s RB18 arose almost immediately.
The FIA, who previously knew about the modification, sent officials to the team’s facility this week to investigate, according to Auto Motor und Sport in Germany.
Former Red Bull employees who currently work at Aston Martin were questioned about whether any information about the 2022 model had been unlawfully passed on.
Dan Fallows, the former head of aerodynamics at Red Bull, is one of them, having recently joined Aston Martin as technical director. Despite the fact that he barely arrived a month ago, he will have had no say in this new development.
The governing body revealed, however, that the Barcelona-spec car was a second design path that Aston has been studying since November of last year, and has been developing since it became evident that the A-spec concept wasn’t performing as expected.
“We went low and hard [with the original design]. In our simulations, this rewarded us again and again,” said chief technical officer Andrew Green. “The car got better with each step. We could see the goal, so it seemed the right way to go. None of our tests suggested that it would give us a problem with the instability of the car.”
“Other teams that have gone our way now have big problems because our car concept loses massive amounts of lap time when it falls out of that window of car height that it was designed for.
“The problem was only identified when the cars went out on track. Now we’re all trying to get back out of the trap in reverse.”
The internal overhaul, which includes revised radiator locations, is another apparent indication that the B-spec AMR22 isn’t a simple RB18 replica.
“The chassis had to be built to accommodate two different cooling systems. If we hadn’t done that, it would have been impossible to switch to the new sidepod geometry,” Green explained. “It’s not a job that gets done overnight. It’s a complex process because you have to leave your development concept and go a different way.
“By now we have all realised that this phenomenon is a legacy of these rules. Some have managed it well, others not so much. We belong to that group at the moment.”
After Jeddah, Aston Martin made the brave decision to alter ideas, giving them enough time to produce enough parts for both drivers to get the updated car for Spain.
