© Jiri Krenek for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Aston Martin Chief Technical Officer Andrew Green says basing their 2020 car on the 2019 Mercedes, helped the team while developing their 2022 challenger.
Back in 2020, when Aston Martin was called Racing Point, the team introduced a car that was heavily based on the 2019 Mercedes W10.
Aston Martin Chief Technical Officer Andrew Green says the things they learned while working on the car “definitely” helped while they were developing the team’s 2022 challenger.
“It definitely opened our eyes to new ways of working – new concepts, new ideas,” Green told The Race.
“And it has enabled that thinking then to follow through to some degree on the 21’ car but the 2022 car definitely.”
However, back in 2020 the team was facing accusations that they illegally copied Mercedes’ car. Green explains this wasn’t the case.
“What we did was look at the car and went about working out why that car was significantly quicker than everybody else.
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“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.
