Aston Martin buys its power units, gearboxes and rear suspension from Mercedes, but performance director Tom McCullough says they had no clue, in the package of shared items, of which direction the Germans would go.
The W13’s very slim sidepod arrangement, the result of the Brackley engine team’s search for an ultra-efficient cooling system, was the talk of the Bahrain circuit.
“We had no idea what was coming,” McCullough said when asked by Motorsport.com.
“We don’t share that kind of information. Rear suspension, gearbox, engine hydraulics… that’s what we share.”
“So the whole radiator package and the cooling side of it is not something they tell us about. I started seeing it on social media the day before, a lot of people were talking about it. And that was the first time I heard about it.”
“I think fundamentally what you see different with the Mercedes is just the packaging of the radiators which then feed the heat exchangers ( intercoolers ).”
“So if you look at all the cars, it’s fascinating to see each team’s interpretation of the sidepod design. It’s obviously an area that allows freedom and quite a powerful area to control aerodynamics.”
In contrast, the Aston Martin AMR22 has more traditional sidepods. However, McCullough admits the team is ready to look at alternatives as it develops its car.
“We’ve done a lot of testing with a lot of different parts and concepts and pontoons throughout the development phase,” he said.
“And we have some new parts that we’re looking at, a lot of different solutions.”
“Of course now you’re going to see what everyone else has done, you’ve seen nine other teams’ interpretations of the rules. So there’s always some kind of convergence. But Mercedes is obviously quite different.
“And the aero design guys are deciding what solutions they have right now and what they’re thinking of doing in the future.”
McCullough says Aston Martin is already hard at work on different ideas: “The car you’re looking at now looks nothing like the one we have in the wind tunnel. And I’m sure it’s the same for everyone.”
“As you adapt your cars and optimize them, there will be a strong element out there that you want to take into account. So let’s review the data we already have.”
“As [technical director] Andrew Green said, we try with this car not to lead ourselves into a dead end.
“So of all the different solutions out there, from the packaging and philosophy side, we thought we wanted to be able to have a little bit of freedom to not totally lock ourselves into one philosophy.”
“And so it was, we’re open to convergence. I think for all the teams there will be an element of convergence, but maybe not that radical. It’s a very interesting time. I think the aero design guys need to have information overload on this moment”.
McCullough said there had been a lot of work to do at the Barcelona and Bahrain tests to get up to speed with the new cars and tyres.
“It’s been the hardest six days of testing I’ve ever been involved with, just having to understand what you’re doing, and react to it, and try to do all the main elements of testing.
“You have to map and understand the car, you have to try to get the most out of the car.
“We don’t want to have porpoising. But also long runs, runs with a lot of fuel, tire degradation… Barcelona is obviously very cold, it’s very hot here, quite unique rough tarmac, we were trying to understand and take all of that into account. by also doing some tests, thinking about Jeddah and some other races”.
“So I’m quite happy that we got through all the main test elements that we wanted to get through, and the car is reacting and behaving as we think it should.”
