It’s an unusual time for a team to be making big personnel changes with the end of the season so near on the horizon, but Aston Martin has no time to wait.
It’s why it released technical director Dan Fallows, once heralded as a defining acquisition from the clutches of Red Bull Racing, via a no-fuss press release this week with just three rounds to go for the season.
“I would like to thank Dan for his contribution to Aston Martin in the last two years,” Aston Martin group CEO Andy Cowell said in an extremely brief statement. “Dan led the team to the success of the AMR23 which secured eight podiums last season.”
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Two years is a relatively short time frame for a technical director to effect meaningful change, but the ambitious Aston Martin team is in a rush.
From 1 January teams will finally be allowed to start work on their 2026 cars, and Aston Martin, like every team, sees the sweeping rule changes as a chance to take the big step into the frontrunning pack.
Every move made by any team today is taken with a view of being best positioned for that regulatory change.
For a time Fallows looked like the man who could’ve led the team there. Having served his apprenticeship under Adrian Newey at Red Bull Racing, he finally earnt the chance to beat his own path when Silverstone came knocking ahead of the 2022 season.
The team’s podium-contending start to 2023 was impressive, but his star has waned ever since.
Aston Martin has plummeted from second early in last year’s championship to an uncompetitive fifth today, when it’s under threat from at least two teams for that place in the final three rounds.
“These ground effect cars are rather complex,” team owner Lawrence Stroll said in September. “Obviously we went in a different, or what clearly as appears now a wrong direction. We’re trying to find our way back.”
It was the first time Stroll had been willing to talk down his project.
Two months later Fallows was gone.
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But the writing was on the wall before Stroll spoke out.
Fallows arrived at Aston Martin as its senior technical brain, but by the time he left he’d been usurped not once, not twice but thrice.
CEO Cowell was hired for having led Mercedes’s engine division through its dominant hybrid years.
Chief technical director Enrico Cardile was pinched from a similar technical leadership position at Ferrari.
And then of course there’s managing technical partner Adrian Newey, the legendary designer under whom Fallows earnt his wings at Red Bull Racing.
Quite apart from looking like a tacit lack of faith in Fallows’s leadership, the stacked line-up reeked of having too many cooks in the kitchen.
While the team initially insisted there was space for all of them, evidently it’s had a change of heart, with reports that it may choose not to replace Fallows at all.
And even if it does have room in the design office for all these giants of F1’s technical landscape, it almost certainly doesn’t in the budget cap.
Fallows would have been one of the team’s top three earners when he was hired, which would have placed him outside the budget cap. Team principal Mike Krack would be one of the others.
Newey, with a reported annual salary of $59 million, would have comfortably blown both out of the water. Cardile, in a technically senior role, surely would have been promised a larger pay cheque too.
With so many other high-profile technical personnel on the payroll — CEO Cowell, technical executive director Bob Bell, engineering director Luca Furbatto, deputy technical director Eric Blandin — cost was always going to emerge as a limiting factor at some point.
Moving Fallows out of the F1 team — the press release says he’ll remain within the broader Aston Martin group — is an important pressure release on the team’s finances.
But performance — or lack of it — remained the most important factor in Fallows’s demise.
Money spent on his wage can now be deployed towards finding performance elsewhere.
Just in time, too, because the team is about to hit a critical juncture in pursuit of its sky-high aim to become an F1 grandee.
ASTON MARTIN IS STRUGGLING TO ARREST ITS DECLINE
The big spending, big hiring, big talking Aston Martin harbours commensurately big goals under billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll.
On Stroll’s watch the former midfield team wants for nothing.
Aston Martin has always had a world champion in the cockpit, first with Sebastian Vettel and now with Fernando Alonso.
Outside the cockpit he bought up every talented engineer and designer he could get his hands on.
The veritable super team needed a commensurately impressive headquarters, so Stroll has sunk millions into a state-of-the-art Formula 1 headquarters out the back of the portable buildings in which the team used to be based.
Soon the team will cut the ribbon on a brand-new wind tunnel to go with its cutting-edge simulation tools.
“This is a project we embarked on — I embarked on — a few years ago to create hopefully one of the greatest Formula 1 teams that will be,” he said at last year’s season launch.
Not just the greatest team that ever has been, but the greatest team that ever will be.
His big talk was backed up by big deeds last year, when Aston Martin emerged as Red Bull Racing’s closest challenger in the opening months of the year.
Rocketing up from seventh on the previous season’s constructors title table, it collected six podiums from the first eight races, including a pair of second-place finishes.
But ever since then Aston Martin’s story has been one of a big fall.
From second early in last year’s championship it sunk to fifth by the end of the year, usurped by the fast-improving McLaren late in the year.
While it’s likely to finish fifth in the championship again this season, it’ll be a much less convincing result on pure pace.
Qualifying comparisons 2023-24
Qualifying 2023: 6.77 average (5th)
Qualifying 2024: 8.67 average (5th)
Average gap to pole 2023 (last four rounds): 0.961 seconds (8th)
Average gap to pole 2024 (last four rounds): 1.242 seconds (9th)
And there’s no solace to be found in race conditions, with the drop even steeper on Sundays, so much so that it’s tracking to score less than a third of last year’s points.
Race comparisons 2023-24
Race result 2023: 5.95 average (4th)
Race result 2024: 9.10 average (5th)
Best finish 2023: 2nd (3)
Best finish 2024: 5th (1)
Score 2023 (21 rounds): 273 points (5th)
Score 2024 (21 rounds): 86 points (5th)
These are not the sort of numbers you’d expect from the greatest team that ever will be.
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WHERE HAS IT GONE WRONG?
In some respects Aston Martin is suffering under the weight of unfair expectations.
Last year’s fast start was impressive and the plaudits well deserved, but the team was also flattered by Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren all underperforming in the second year of this regulation set.
All three rebounded before the end of the year to leapfrog Aston Martin, leaving the team a more representative fifth.
Averaging the team’s gap to pole over the season to date shows it’s still the fifth-quickest car this year, albeit only just.
Average gap to pole, 2024 to date
1. Red Bull Racing: 0.132 seconds
2. McLaren: 0.219 seconds
3. Ferrari: 0.327 seconds
4. Mercedes: 0.473 seconds
5. Aston Martin: 0.916 seconds
6. RB: 1.016 seconds
7. Haas: 1.093 seconds
8. Williams: 1.235 seconds
9. Alpine: 1.275 seconds
10. Sauber: 1.640 seconds
But the above metric tells only part of the story. In fact it flatters Aston Martin, which hasn’t been close to being the fifth quickest team for months.
In fact since the mid-season break it’s been outscored by both Alpine and Haas. It’s equal on points with Williams despite the team changing drivers partway through the stint and suffering four failures to finish.
RB, with DNFs, is only three points behind.
Looking at the team’s more recent performances in isolation tells a different story.
Average gap to pole, last four rounds
1. McLaren: 0.079 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing: 0.183 seconds
3. Ferrari: 0.200 seconds
4. Mercedes: 0.446 seconds
5. Haas: 0.862 seconds
6. Alpine: 0.897 seconds
7. RB: 0.971 seconds
8. Williams: 1.164 seconds
9. Aston Martin: 1.242 seconds
10. Sauber: 1.753 seconds
It’s here that we begin to see the root of Aston Martin’s problem.
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The car it started with last year and even this year might have been a solid baseline, but the team has comprehensively failed to keep up with the breakneck speed of development in Formula 1.
We can approximate the rate at which teams improve their car by drawing a trendline through each car’s qualifying performances as it moves closer to or further away from pole position during the season.
Development rate, season to date
1. McLaren: improved by 0.456 seconds
2. Alpine: improved by 0.302 seconds
3. Mercedes: improved by 0.149 seconds
4. Williams: improved by 0.101 seconds
5. Haas: improved by 0.028 seconds
6. Ferrari: improved by 0.021 seconds
7. RB: degraded by 0.322 seconds
8. Red Bull Racing: degraded by 0.361 seconds
9. Sauber: degraded by 0.640 seconds
10. Aston Martin: degraded by 1.113 seconds
This doesn’t necessarily mean Aston Martin has been making its car worse as the year has gone on; it only means that every other team is developing at a faster rate.
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A NEW APPROACH IS NEEDED
But that said, Aston Martin has struggled more than most to bring effective upgrades to its car.
It’s a phenomenon that’s dominated the development game with these supersensitive ground-effect cars. Whereas in previous technical eras bringing downforce to the car was relatively straightforward, with drag being the main limiting factor, under the current rules adding performance is a far more delicate process.
Ground effect cars generate most of their performance from the underfloor, which makes them extremely responsive to even minute changes in ride height.
But simulating ride height in a wind tunnel is extremely difficult, particularly when all teams are now looking for relatively small gains.
It’s made correlating expected performance from the wind tunnel and computer simulations with the actual performance experienced from track to track far harder than it has been in the past.
Complicating things for Aston Martin has been its approach to upgrading the car by bringing new parts to the track thick and fast.
It’s a method that could pay big dividends if every part worked, but all it appears to have done is left the team lost on its development path, uncertain of what works, what doesn’t work and why.
McLaren serves as a good comparison.
The fastest team in Formula 1 — which started last season much slower than Aston Martin — has been extremely picky about which new parts make it from the design office to the racetrack.
Its development stream has therefore flowed much more slowly, and upgrades have tended to be incremental.
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As an example, recently it delayed the arrival of a new, heavily revised floor until the Mexico City Grand Prix late last month.
Prior to that upgrade it had been running a floor spec introduced in Miami in May, more than five months ago.
“What we want to do is bring something that we know works,” McLaren engineering technical director Neil Houldey said, per Autosport.
“What we don’t want to do is bring any confusion into the team about the results of the components we’re bringing, so we’re waiting and bringing them when they’re ready.”
Chief designer Rob Marshall explained that grouping new parts together was proving to be more effective at introducing new bits as soon as they could be manufactured.
“Sometimes you just have to hold on a little bit while you wait for a chunk of bits to come all at the same time,” he said, per Autosport.
“The advantage in doing that is that often bits don’t combine very well or as well as you think they would, and if you deliver them in one lump, then that sort of combination of parts has been in CFD together, it was developed together, it’s been through the wind tunnel together, so you can be more confident with that combination of bits works well together.
“Whereas if you do it bit by bit, you might introduce an upgrade on one part and then work on another part and find out actually it’s a bit compromised by the previous change you made.”
McLaren, as the pace setter, will naturally become the template for other teams hoping to climb the table, especially considering the speed with which Woking has gone from also-ran to likely championship winner.
Under Fallows’s leadership Aston Martin appeared to take the wrong approach.
With weeks to spare before the first steps of 2026 are taken, Aston Martin has rolled the dice.
It has the facilities. It has the money. It still has the staff firepower.
From now on it’s all out of excuses.
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