Aston Martin technical director: 'Can't just copy other teams'

Aston Martin wants to start shaping its own thinking to get closer to the forefront. Technical director Dan Fallows tells The Race that the team will not move forward if it just starts copying the competition.

It was one of the most controversial cars of the past few years: the car Racing Point appeared on the starting line with in 2020. The car looked so much like Mercedes' championship-winning car from the previous year that the Racing Point was also jokingly called 'the pink Mercedes'. It proved successful: Racing Point finished that year in fourth place among constructors.

In 2022, the team - which had since been renamed Aston Martin - had yet another controversy of the same nature: over the course of the season, the aerodynamic design of the Aston Martin car began to look very much like that of Red Bull. This was especially noteworthy because that season Fallows traded his position as head of aerodynamics at Red Bull Racing for a position as technical director at Aston Martin. In both cases, it was ruled that no rules had been broken.

'We have to find our own way'

Yet Fallows seems to want to move away from this pattern. Aston Martin has stated several times that it has ambitious plans for the future and wants to fight for the title. According to Fallows, this requires adopting a different mindset.

“The important thing for us is to make sure that we don’t just replicate what our competitors are doing,” said Fallows. “We don’t believe that’s going to help us overtake the likes of Mercedes, Red Bull, and Ferrari. We have to develop our own way of doing things. That does take time, but we’ve got a hugely ambitious group of people."

If Aston Martin does indeed want to join the front of the grid however, there is still a lot to do. The team closed 2022 in just seventh place and drove on track mostly around 10th.