Aston Martin Technical Director Dan Fallows has admitted his team and its competitors face a challenge balancing efforts on 2025 and ’26 Formula 1 car development.
The FIA has imposed rules preventing Formula 1 teams from beginning development on 2026 cars before January 1, 2025.
With the 2026 regulations including noticeable differences to the current regulation style via movable aerodynamics, shorter wheelbase and narrower design, getting designs right will be pivotal.
To balance that against making sure next year’s machines are as good as can be, Fallow was asked if an extra push was being made this year on development to start 2025 on the right note.
“Yeah, I think we’ll see that,” Fallows told media including Motorsport Week.
“But I’m sure lots of teams will do the same thing, but we’re absolutely focused on trying to make sure we can get AMR25 into the best shape as possible early on.
“It’s going to be a challenge for everybody but trying to split your resources, particularly next year when we can do work on both is going to be a big challenge.
“How much effort you put into the ’25 car, how much you divert resource to that.
“The last thing you want to do with engineers is to give them two problems at the same time because they start forgetting which car they’re working on and things like that.
“It’s important for us to make sure that they have that clarity of purpose so they know exactly what they’re working on. But we have to be very adaptable in terms of moving resource around.”
Aston Martin’s task of balancing resources is made harder given its preparing its transition from utilising Mercedes’ wind tunnel in Brackley, to getting its state-of-the-art brand new wind tunnel online at Silverstone next year.
Fallows revealed that Aston has “a hard date” where they will make the switch between the two wind tunnels and that it’s important to make sure everything is ready for that date to ensure both 2025 and ’26 car development continues smoothly.
“We can only nominate one wind tunnel at a time, so we have to agree a date that we will go out of one wind tunnel into another,” he said.
“Obviously picking that date is important. It means the new tunnel has to be ready, we have to have the new models available.
“But yeah, it’s very clear what we need to do, so we just have to get that date.”
However, as difficult as some of the challenges that Aston Martin faces with its transition between wind tunnels, it does afford the team some flexibility in how they decide to develop the AMR25.
Asked if Aston Martin can transfer development on the AMR25 from within the Mercedes wind tunnel, over to the opening of its own, Fallows said: we have all of the options to do that kind of stuff if we want to.”
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