The team based the design of its 2020 car on the title-winning Mercedes vehicle from the previous season when they were known as Racing Point.
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According to Andrew Green, the team’s technical director, Aston Martin’s decision to practically clone the Mercedes car in 2020 will ‘definitely’ assist the team in 2022. The British team chose to base the design of its 2020 challenger on the title-winning Mercedes vehicle from the previous season when they were known as Racing Point. It was a relatively effective approach for them, since their car was usually the third fastest on the grid, and their drivers took one win and three podiums between them.
Green believes it was also one that opened their eyes, and as a result, it will have aided them in the design and development of their car for the 2022 season.
“It definitely opened our eyes to new ways of working – new concepts, new ideas,” he said as per The Race. “And it has enabled that thinking then to follow through to some degree on the 21’ car but the 2022 car definitely.”
Green’s team was heavily chastised for what became known as their ‘pink Mercedes,’ with a number of teams accusing them of cheating and rejecting the design. He is adamant, though, that they did nothing wrong and that attempting to duplicate another design was far from simple for them, taking a great deal of effort and talent. Rivals were enraged by the success with which they completed such projects, he said.
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“What we did was look at the car and went about working out why that car was significantly quicker than everybody else,” he added.
“We did our own learning. There’s no shortcut to doing it. It’s not a copy, it’s developing a solution where you’ve got a rough idea of what you think the answer is, but you’ve still got to get there and it takes a lot of development and a lot of work to understand. In some ways, it’s even harder because sometimes the directions pull you away from what you believe to be the right answer. I think the team did a great job in understanding the philosophy behind it.”
“If you look up and down the grid, a lot of other teams have taken the same philosophy. They did what we did last year and they’ve taken the philosophy of the fastest car and developed it as their own. It’s not a new concept, it’s just that everybody latched on to it because I think we did quite a good job and other teams were a little bit upset that we’d done quite a good job,” Green concluded.
