Newey’s first Aston Martin is a true concentration of all the sophisticated solutions introduced by Adrian in recent years. But this time it seems the brilliant designer has gone a bit too far, taking every single technical concept of the car to the extreme.
These choices have highlighted Honda’s struggles, with a power unit developed by the Japanese technicians who remained after the exodus of their best engineers to Red Bull. During the April F1 break, I focused on carrying out an in-depth analysis of this car.
As we can observe in the illustration below, the AMR26’s bodywork features a sidepod undercut that is unmatched on the grid. It is truly radical in its shapes. The radiator packaging is pushed to the extreme and features sinuous shapes.
These latter elements are relegated to a tiny portion at the top of the sidepods. The rear suspension, thanks to the upward extension of the crash structure designed as a rigid mounting base for the upper wishbone.
As with the front end, the layout is multi-link, with the upper wishbone featuring different mounting points to the upright, clearly visible in the brake caliper drawing. Looking at the chassis in the illustration below, the most interesting detail concerns the choice introduced for the first time at the front, on both the upper and lower wishbones.
It is a monolithic arm that spans from one axis to the other. This is a solution Adrian has proposed at alternating phases during his past at Milton Keynes. As mentioned, the front suspension is also multi-link, following the path set by the RB15 in 2019.
The grey schematic highlights the extreme sculpting mentioned earlier: an area of the car revealing a sharp cut in the chassis cross-section right below the radiators.
In the oval inset, meanwhile, we can see how the bodywork forms a sort of “skin” with very little clearance from the mechanical components. This choice makes any potential modification almost impossible without significantly altering the car’s shapes.
It must be said that the only sophisticated choice the Englishman decided not to introduce concerns the front chassis bulkhead section, which is now squared-off and no longer V-shaped, unlike the latest Red Bulls designed by Newey. Finally, a necessary clarification.
In reality, the monolithic wishbone solution had been applied in an even more radical way at the beginning of the new millennium. Back in the days of the single-keel chassis in the 2001 season, Ferrari introduced a lower wishbone made of a single block, for both the front leg and the rear mounting.
This solution was adopted the following year by Renault and later brought to the rear end as well. The last drawing illustrates the alternation of this technical concept: initially introduced only on the upper arm, then applied on the RB16 exclusively to the lower arm, before returning to the upper arm once again on the RB19.
Currently, Newey is working on an evolved version of this element that can guarantee greater reliability and reduce the issues related to the severe vibrations that prevented the drivers from driving consistently for the entire duration of the race.
