Surprise F1 team gifts itself ‘world champion’ label
New Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell has given the squad a “world champion” label despite its shortcomings during a troubled 2024 season.
Throughout the last campaign, the large number of upgrade packages delivered by the team failed to yield the expected boost in lap time, with Fernando Alonso in particular growing frustrated at times.
Aston is experiencing a period of growth as chairman Lawrence Stroll tries to turn the team into a world-championship-winning contender with big technical hires including Adrian Newey from Red Bull and Enrico Cardile from Ferrari.
A management reshuffle ahead of the new season sees Cowell take on team principal duties while Mike Krack shifts to chief trackside officer. Another change has moved Tom McCullough to an unspecified role from the performance director position.
Reflecting on Aston’s trouble at delivering effective upgrades in 2024, Cowell has set a high pass rate he feels the team must achieve.
“We definitely won the world championship for the most updates in 2024, but those updates didn’t deliver the lap time – and what everybody wants in this business is to deliver lap time,” Cowell explained.
“We need to make sure that all our tools and processes at the technology campus are working well enough to ensure that whenever we take an update to the circuit, we are at least 90% certain that it’s going to work on the track and meet our expectations.
“That’s not to say we must get it right every time. I’ve seen statistics that show that in true research and development environments, a 20% success rate is high.
“If we can get a 20% success rate then that’s good, but the difference is that this needs to happen at the AMR technology campus and not at the track.”
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The level Aston Martin must reach
The centre-piece of Aston’s new factory is a state-of-the-art wind tunnel, which Cowell labelled as the “most advanced” in F1.
Despite the facilities, he is still expecting an increase in correlation between simulation data and real-world on-track performance.
“It’s not easy to achieve, but it’s what we need to be aiming for,” he continued.
“We’ve got very powerful CFD tools and the most advanced wind tunnel in the sport coming online but they are only simulations; there will always be the risk of data not quite matching up with what we find on the circuit.
“But our simulations can give us a robust steer and I’m confident we can get to the point where we’re right 90 per cent of the time.
“That’s the level that world championship-winning teams are operating at so that needs to be our aim at a minimum.”
