Aston Martin defended their strategy of copying Mercedes, saying that they get some unfair criticism for doing it.
The F1 grid were left in shock when Aston Martin, known as Racing Point back in 2020, based their car for that season on the 2019 title-winning Mercedes car. It was a successful approach if nothing else, with the Pink Mercedes winning a race and taking three podiums that year.
However, there were many protests on the grid regarding what Aston Martin did two years ago. Although they were dismissed, it garnered a lot of negative press for the team.
Despite all that, Aston Martin defended their strategy of copying Mercedes, and proceeded to point out that other teams have done the same.
“It definitely opened our eyes to new ways of working – new concepts, new ideas,” team technical officer Andrew 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.”
Efforts
“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,” he concluded.
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