Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough has admitted that it will be a ‘challenge’ for Formula 1 teams to eat away at the DRS advantage found by reigning champions Red Bull.
Compared to the RB18, Red Bull was able to shed weight on its 2023 challenger and, paired with an already low-drag design, the efficacy of the RB19’s DRS contributed to the team’s evident straight-line prowess in the early stages of the season.
Red Bull went on to win 21 of the 22 grands prix this year as its rivals were unable to find a response to the eventual runaway champions.
“We noticed Red Bull were very strong at that last year, so they sort of took the march on that,” said Aston Martin’s McCullough of Red Bull’s top-end performance.
“I remember Jeddah last year was the first time everyone was going, ‘Wow, that’s quite a big DRS switch.’
“The interaction between the whole back of the car, and the loading on the diffuser, the beam wing, the rear wing, the main plane, the flap, the brake ducts, the interaction of all that’s obviously quite different to previous generation cars.
“And getting a stable aerodynamic platform that we don’t have porpoising and all those other things that we don’t want, getting lots of load, but getting it that when you open the DRS that you have as big as reach as possible is the aim.
“We didn’t have a particularly strong one to start off with, and we were just systematically developing to increase that whilst trying to retain stability.”
McCullough admitted that closing the DRS deficit to Red Bull would not be straightforward due to the knock-on effects that updates to the rear of the car would yield.
“All those elements at the back of the car are linked,” he continued. “There’s only so much you can do within the regulations. You’re always trying to produce downforce and not have too much drag.
“But then on top of that, to get the DRS switch and get all those things working well, it is a challenge for the aerodynamic teams. That’s why you’ve seen quite a lot of development in that area, not only by ourselves, but by other people too.”
In preparation for the 2024 campaign, Aston Martin introduced a new rear wing to the AMR23 at last month’s Abu Dhabi season finale.
A trio of modifications were made to the rear wing assembly including a wider span beam wing, changes to the endplates and revisions to the upper rear wing assembly in the hope of finding greater levels of efficiency which Aston Martin believes has already shown promising results.
“For us, it was important to get it on the car [at] the end of this year,” McCullough said. “Just to correlate what we see in the wind tunnel and CFD, and we did some cross-car, cross-session compares, and the wing is performing well.”
