Red Bull made some jibes about Aston Martin’s new Formula One car looking like a copy of its old one after Fernando Alonso raced to a podium finish in Bahrain on Sunday, but rivals should perhaps be more concerned about what remained unseen.
Champion Red Bull won the opener one-two with Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez while Spaniard Alonso finished third, far behind on track but an impressive leap on last year for the Silverstone-based team.
The team, seventh overall in 2022 and owned by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, is ahead of Mercedes and Ferrari in second place after one race.
“It’s flattering to see the resemblance of that car to ours,” commented Red Bull boss Christian Horner. “They say imitation is the biggest form of flattery and it’s good to see the old car going so well.”
Mexican Perez told reporters it was “nice to see three Red Bull cars on the podium” and added “we are all Red Bull drivers”.
Dismissing the AMR23 as a “Green Red Bull”, is too easy, however -- and not just because there are a Mercedes engine and gearbox in the back and time spent in the Mercedes wind tunnel.
Some of the comments reflect Aston Martin luring top talent away from Red Bull, with Dan Fallows joining as technical director last year.
They also pick at old sores -- the team’s 2020 car, then a Racing Point, was dubbed the ‘Pink Mercedes’ for its similarity to the previous year’s championship-winning car driven by Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.
Red Bull’s motorsport head Helmut Marko told Servus TV on Sunday he saw three Red Bulls on the Bahrain podium and “what Fallows had in his head cannot be erased”.
Fallows gave his own take at the launch of the AMR23 in February, suggesting the more significant elements of his team’s new car were much more than skin deep.
“There are things which are perhaps a bit less obvious on the car which are in there to allow us to push some of these development avenues that we believe may be fruitful in the future,” he said, without giving details.
“Sometimes those things aren’t necessarily visible at all.
“I think what’s interesting is not to necessarily focus on the similarities (to others) but what are the differences.
“They are the hard-won things on the car, the things that actually are sometimes the hardest gains to get in terms of downforce but in many ways they are the ones that will make the cars either better or worse than others.”
Fallows said the regulations were “incredibly prescriptive” and there were only a limited number of realistic solutions to the aerodynamic problems all teams faced.
“It’s inevitable that some cars are going to look very similar,” he said.
“There are two very obvious, very sensible development routes from an aerodynamic point of view in these visible areas of the car.”
Aston Martin, he added, had gone aggressive and wanted “to try and imagine where the designs would be in months’ and years’ time so we can leapfrog the normal development routes.”
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