Amid information blackouts and trickles of ‘unofficial’ lap times and lap counts, perhaps the biggest fascination of the Formula 1‘s pre-season test in Barcelona has come to light.
After opting to sit out the first three days of the test, Aston Martin inadvertently ramped up some serious excitement by the impending arrival of its ARM26 challenger.
To paraphrase the stereotypical bored child in the backseat of a car on a long drive – ‘is it nearly here yet?’ ‘Is it nearly here yet?’
With misinformation circling in the air like the cargo plane it definitely wasn’t on, the car finally arrived in Spain on Thursday morning, and work quickly commenced to make it track-ready.
And late in the afternoon, the team’s first car to be spawned from the pencil of Adrian Newey turned its wheel in anger under the hands of Lance Stroll.
With security patrolling the Circuit de-Barcelona Catalunya like overofficious pitbulls, it’s no surprise that Aston has appeared to want to keep its powder dry by ensuring the first official image released of the car is in black and white, the dark testing livery blending into the image like a detective’s overcoat in a 1950s film noir.
But it’s worth taking as deep a dive as possible, with a few bits of filter adjusting to try and brighten the image as much as possible, and with the additional leaked images via some long lenses taken from the track’s perimeters, here’s what Motorsport Week has tried to decipher.
Both side[pod]s of the story for Aston Martin
Newey revealed last Spring that he found the new regulations “scary” as he began to sharpen his pencil and interpret it his way through the Silverstone-based squad‘s AMR26.
Rumours began to surface this week that the car would feature some sort of radical sidepod design, and the early images appear to corroborate this.
Streamlined is one word one could use to describe it, but there appears to be an inlet that has an underbite, which is remarkably similar to the one featured on the Newey-designed Red Bull RB19, which, you need not be reminded, was the car that won all but one of the races in the 2023 season.
Whilst the engine cover seems otherwise be compact, the hood has a large opening, which suggests the necessity for a great deal of cooling for the Honda V6 Hybrid powertrain.
There is minimal bodywork around the floor, which, at first glance, looks as if it has a high rake, another trademark of Newey’s during the peak of his genius at Red Bull. The sidepod’s shape could see it work in tandem with the floor to push air to the edge and generate more aerodynamic load.
The suspension, at early impressions, is double pushrod, but has some rather interesting geometry. It has been set up in a way that creates a distance within the triangles which might allow airflow to generate cleanly.
This, coupled with the supermodel-slim sidepods, means that, in theory, the potential cleanliness of the airflow could work well in relation to the new regulations.
The nose is similar to that of McLaren and Mercedes, and copies the latter by having it mounted to the second flap of the front wing. But one telling, unique feature is the width of the nose, but tapers along towards the cockpit.
It is hard to properly determine, but from the initial image zoomed in it looks as if there is a suspension arm attached to the ‘swan neck’ double mounting of the rear wing.
Whilst everything has been observed from Aston’s own conspicuously taken images and the grainy distant shots taken in the public highways around the circuit, but it features the hallmarks of something unique, something potentially intutitive.
But without a doubt, something very Newey.
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