Aston Martin, Hungaroring, 2022

Aston Martin expect rivals will copy novel rear wing by Singapore GP

2022 Hungarian Grand Prix

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Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack anticipates that rival Formula 1 teams will copy their innovative rear wing design by October’s Singapore Grand Prix.

The team revealed its unusual new rear wing design at last round at the Hungaroring, a track which requires maximum downforce levels. Following the summer break there are three races in Europe through August and September prior to the start of the flyaway leg of the season in Singapore, on another track where peak downforce is at a premium over drag.

The rear wing Aston Martin used in Hungary provoked curious glances from rival teams and questions over its legality. The lower plane of the wing curves upwards and forms an extension of a vertical endplate-like structure. However Aston Martin pointed out the FIA was consulted on the design throughout its development.

Aston Martin’s performance director Tom McCullough talked of his satisfaction of seeing the rear wing design make it to the track and see nobody else pursue the same design. The team’s cars finished 10th and 11th, repeating the result scored in the preceding race at Paul Ricard using the conventional design.

Team principal Mike Krack said it showed the quality of the original development work done by a team which attracted considerable comment at the Spanish Grand Prix when it revealed an upgraded car which bore a close similarity to Red Bull’s RB18.

“You guys have written a lot about Barcelona and after Barcelona when we did the change in our concept,” Krack told media including RaceFans.

Aston Martin, Hungaroring, 2022
Aston Martin’s unusual high-downforce rear wing
“I think by this, it shows also that our team can innovate, that we have a lot of ideas as well. Maybe we’ll see some other teams might follow a similar approach.”

He added: “The next high-downforce races are Netherlands and Singapore. I would be surprised if we are the only ones in Singapore racing this idea.”

Alfa Romeo’s head of trackside engineering Xevi Pujolar said they will put some thought into whether the design might work on their car. He said Aston Martin “definitely look, in terms of performance this weekend they seem to be okay, for sure.

“So I think probably we will have to have a look as well [at this wing]. In qualifying, I don’t know why, they didn’t consolidate the performance, but in the race their pace was okay.”

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Ida Wood
Often found in junior single-seater paddocks around Europe doing journalism and television commentary, or dabbling in teaching photography back in the UK. Currently based...
Claire Cottingham
Claire has worked in motorsport for much of her career, covering a broad mix of championships including Formula One, Formula E, the BTCC, British...

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27 comments on “Aston Martin expect rivals will copy novel rear wing by Singapore GP”

  1. The only thing which can ban this if it generate dirty air then it will be a instant ban.

    1. It creates dirty air – every external part of the car does – the important part is how much effect does it have on following cars.

    2. @macleod
      It will be probably a DAS like ban. It’s not the teams’ fault if the high paid FIA officials, even with CAD designs used nowadays, cannot be precise in defining the technical specification of a fundamental car component like the rear wing.

    3. Coventry Climax
      10th August 2022, 11:35

      The FIA has yet failed to quantify ‘dirty air’. Also, according to Mike Krack, the FIA was in on it from the start, so it would surprise me if they ban it on that.
      More important to me is whether it proves to be succesful in getting laptimes down. They qualified 14 and 18, so that does not promise too much. The race was better, but that was a repeat result from a race with the old wing.
      Innovative in itself means nothing, if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. If it does, I’m sure it will be copied, in some form or other. And then, it might turn out, the FIA have managed to mess up yet again, when some copies/designs are more legal than others.
      Now why does that remind me of Ferrari? ;-)

      1. the FIA was in on it from the start

        That’s a bit misleading from Aston Martin – and I’m not surprised though – because the rumours coming from the paddock state otherwise. Tombazis was almost stunned when he received CAD design of the AM rear wing. He never saw it coming because the solution although legal, it’s in total contradiction with “the intent of the regulations”.

        The FIA were aware of the solution before it went to production, I think that’s the standard procedure. Though it doesn’t mean that they were satisfied with it and will not try to get it banned for next year.

        1. Coventry Climax
          10th August 2022, 18:04

          Just curious: What paddock are you in, during the break, and who else are there, for it to still spread rumours?
          We’ll see what happens. Although with the farce F1 has become, I must confess I don’t really care all that much anymore.

          1. Coventry Climax, you are correct in stating that Formula One has become a farce. It has become the laughing stock of all of the sports’ fraternities.

            The current ‘Silly Season’ situation reinforces that.

          2. Coventry Climax,
            The rumour broke the moment Aston Martin brought their wing before the summer break and you can still ask for the source of the rumour without being ironic.

          3. Why is it ironic to ask what your source of that claim is?

            It seems a very reasonable request to ask you to provide the source for your claims, particularly when few others seem to be making the same sort of claims you are making.

          4. anon,

            I don’t have any problem sharing the source. I wasn’t questioning the fact that he was asking for the source as I don’t pretend to own the truth.

            I myself always ask for sources not questioning the commenters but also to learn as much as I can. He could have asked without being ironic.

            The source is the last Motosport podcast Italia. I think the various Franco Nugnes, Antonio Ghini and Giorgio Piola… who covered more than ~ 800 races are can be considered reliable sources.

            I’ll share the link once I’ll be able to.

          5. @tifoso1989 Nunges has a reputation amongst technical forums for being an unreliable source when it comes to technical matters – for example, before the 2021 season, Nunges made a number of claims about the layout of the turbocharger unit that Ferrari would adopt that year that were later demonstrated to be wrong.

          6. Coventry Climax
            12th August 2022, 10:32

            Tifosi1989,

            I had no intention being ironic whatsoever. That’s why I started with “Just curious”, although in hindsight I can see that may not have helped.
            The thing that is though, that if the FIA have such a feeling of disaproval, as you claim, they still approved it. If that is the case, there’s two options forward: The FIA ‘amends’ the rules for next year, or, in line with the role of the unjustly hurt ego they are playing these last years, they come up with new ‘directives’, which implicitly tells the world they have yet again been unable to word their rules correctly and unambigously, but lay the blame elsewhere, with teams that don’t ‘understand’. And that’s the long version of my “we’ll see what happens”, and that next sentence.

          7. anon,
            Ferrari were indeed considering various Turbo layouts for 2021 and they even conducted 2 parallel projects for the 2022 PU only to commit on one project due to the breakthrough they have made with the combustion technology. This was also reported by the race, Mark Hughes. So getting his story wrong doesn’t mean that he made it up. He could have been informed on one of projects that didn’t go to production.

            As for the Aston Martin story, Nugnes said in another podcast that he spoke with the team about the characteristics and the possible advantages of the wing that were about a tenth of a second in Hungaroring. It’s known that he has connections inside Aston Martin and one of them is Luca Furbatto, the engineering director.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KO1EN2Q9_k
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc-8aYKhAp8

          8. Coventry Climax,
            Fair enough.

            I’ve said that AM narrative is misleading when they said “The FIA were on it from the start”. One would think that they have consulted the FIA and the FIA were satisfied with the solution and everything is OK.

            The standard procedure now is to share CAD designs with the FIA before a component goes to production. The rumour that I have reported suggests that Tombazis was caught by surprise, he never saw it coming because although legal, the solution is in clear contradiction with ” the intent of the rules”.

            I agree with you in the last part as I’ve already stated in my comment above that :

            It’s not the teams’ fault if the high paid FIA officials, even with CAD designs used nowadays, cannot be precise in defining the technical specification of a fundamental car component like the rear wing.

          9. @tifoso1989 the problem is that he continued to insist on those claims around the turbocharger unit even after the engine went into production, and indeed after photographs of the engine installation from testing emerged.

            I’ve come across quite a few of his articles in the past where he was adamant that teams would be bringing certain development parts that never materialised, talked about the function of certain upgrades that were later shown to be incorrect, or made claims about developments that seemed to be based on Nunges not understanding the technical regulations properly. Quite a few technical forums have long running jokes too about how, in the past, Nunges spent years claiming that Ferrari would be introducing a narrower nosecone on their cars, only for them to never introduce those claimed upgrades, and about other mistakes that Nunges has made over the years.

            Believe him if you want, but the wider assessment is that Nunges is not reliable – not necessarily that he is making things up on purpose, but rather that it comes more from a lack of technical expertise. This does sound rather like him in that it does have a bit of a clickbait tone to go on about how Tombazis was so shocked and stunned about this development – but it also sounds like Nunges has heavily over-exaggerated Tombazis’s reaction.

  2. In all ahonesty, it would suit Aston/Krack to keep a sock in it. They’ve copied two entire cars, yet are now parading that they might have something others might copy (no guarantee).

    Really like that kid that copies everyones homework in highschool and then ONCE makes it himself, trying to get others to copy from him so he can claim he’s returnd the favor…

    1. I think the Double T Tray idea was also previously copied by both Ferrari and Red Bull. So AM keep making novel innovations, but they also have a tendency to make wholesale changes. Read “Have Red Bull and Ferrari lifted a design idea from Aston Martin for their 2022 F1 cars?”

  3. Here’s how F1 works:
    1. Publish a set of rules.
    2. Wait for the competitors to exhaust their budget developing the best possible performance within those rules.
    3. Change the rules if someone has done a better job than Ferrari.

    1. Change the rules if someone has done a better job than Ferrari

      Nobody has done a better job than Ferrari in terms of car design this year :)

      1. And yet they want to ban something Ferrari didn’t think of.
        Face it, F1 is all about one team and has been from the beginning, and given that the “What Can We Do To Help Ferrari” department accounts for half the FIA’s salary bill, the mind boggles at how they haven’t won every championship since the sport began. To fail so consistently with a level of assistance from the governing body that no one in any other sport has ever enjoyed takes true genius.

        1. I don’t really get the impression f1 is trying to help ferrari, if anything I get the feeling they might’ve been helping mercedes during the last decade.

  4. I don’t know. Repeating the same result as with the previous spec doesn’t exactly shout performance gain. It didn’t take Ferrari very long to copy the keel wing design from AM (about a week if I recall correctly), so we’ll see if others pursue this path as well. I suspect though that Krack is hyping it up to get other teams to spend their precious limited CFD time chasing down something that offers very little gain rather than allowing them to focus on designs that will give them large improvements.

  5. Why would any team copy it if there’s no performance gain? It might even reduce performance, it’s Aston Martin after all.

  6. Rules? If needed, break them!

  7. How is the blunt face of that round ‘handle’ at the top of the end plate aerodynamic?
    It looks like they discovered the wing wouldn’t fit in the box so they sawed the nice swoopy round leading edges off.

    1. Coventry Climax
      12th August 2022, 10:47

      In one of the fotos it looks hollow, like a tube. That could have been a nice idea, making some sort of duct out of it, only it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
      But then, looks and reality may appear to not match, until in hindsight there’s a theory behind it why it does work. Who would have thought, only decades ago, that putting a ridiculously large drop shape on the bow of a big boat would help with the hydrodynamics, where surely a sharp knife edge looked like it should do a better job cleaving through the water, and we’d only used that for some thousands of years already.
      So leave the ‘How is it that’ to the aerodynamic experts. We’ll get the answer once it is either copied or discarded by the other teams.

    2. @clayt
      It’s clearly not very aerodynamic. But it’s there to facilitate a bigger gain elsewhere, in this case an endplate which the rules intended to outlaw for this season. Simply put, a wing with endplates generate more downforce than a similar wing of the same size without endplates, and the size is limited by the rules. Endplates will generate some drag though, even with a smooth aerodynamic front, and some turbulence (dirty air). The reason it looks they way it does here is to follow the existing rules, where minimum radii are mandated on any cross section of the wing. If you start at the top of the wing plane and follow the surface out towards the endplate the surface then curves up and then around the “tube” and down along the outside, without ever making a sharp corner. And that is the key for this design.

      It is used on a high-downforce wing here, where drag is less of an issue. It might be beneficial on lower downforce wings too, though, because even if there is some extra drag from the endplate, the entire wing can be smaller with less drag to compensate, and still generate the same downforce.

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