Mercedes have given Aston Martin big helping hand for 2022 F1 season

Mercedes have inadvertently given Aston Martin a helping hand as the latter are set to ‘clone’ Lewis Hamilton’s 2020 World Championship-winning car. Chief Technical Officer Andrew Green believes that the ‘eye-opening’ design will help Aston Martin challenge in 2022. 

Lewis Hamilton was by far the best driver in the 2020 campaign and did not have quite the same battle with any other contender as he did with Max Verstappen in 2021.  

The Brit finished on 347 points, 124 ahead of Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas.  

And Green has said that Aston Martin have analysed that Mercedes vehicle and why it was quicker than the other cars on the grid.  

It has helped the team design their own car for the upcoming 2022 season, in which Aston Martin will once again have Sebastien Vettel and Lance Stroll.  

“It definitely opened our eyes to new ways of working – new concepts, new ideas. And it has enabled that thinking then to follow through to some degree on the 21’ car but the 2022 car definitely,” Green told The Race. 

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He added: “What we did was look at the car and went about working out why that car was significantly quicker than everybody else. 

“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. 

Green continued: “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. 

“In the limited time that we had to develop it, which was quite short really, it moved as far away as we could in the time available and the reason for that was the change in the aerodynamic regulations that were brought in over the winter.  

“That was the reason why we had to move away, because it was quite a dramatic change and significant change to the performance of the car. 

“We were obliged to because we took a massive hit when we did the update to the car, as in the regulation update, and it took a significant amount of resource and development just to get back up, which is still a long way behind where the car was. We suffered quite heavily.”