Aston Martin provide first sight of 2022 car on-track

Jamie Woodhouse
Lance Stroll drives the AMR22 at Silverstone. England, February 2022.

Lance Stroll driving the Aston Martin AMR22 at Silverstone. England, February 2022.

This new era of Formula 1 just became a whole lot more real as Aston Martin let the AMR22 loose around Silverstone.

Formula 1 has undergone a major regulatory overhaul ahead of the 2022 campaign, changes that were actually planned for 2021 before the global pandemic hit.

Nonetheless, a year later than advertised, Formula 1 has now successfully rolled out these new regulations, aimed at bunching up the grid, allowing cars to follow more closely and improving the overtaking action.

Haas were the first team to launch for 2022, followed by Red Bull, but both challengers looked strikingly similar to the model 2022 cars that we saw presented midway through 2021.

Indeed, Haas confirmed that it was a livery and design launch from them, while Red Bull explained that the RB18 will look different by the time pre-season testing gets underway.

Naturally, a new era like this means that the cars will develop and change constantly, but Aston Martin did reveal the ‘real’ first specification of the AMR22 in their launch event on February 10.

It gave us a chance to get a feel for some of the actual innovations which the engineers have thought up for these all-new challengers, and now, Aston Martin have shown us what one of these cars looks like on the track.

After launching, Aston Martin wasted no time hitting the Silverstone track on the following day, and it was Lance Stroll who had the honour of rolling out of the garage to start the day and this new era in Formula 1.

Those new 18-inch tyres and much-higher front wing instantly stand out.

Stroll was grinning from ear to ear, and who could blame him?

The AMR22 is looking mean and lean. We get a fantastic view of the box inlet design on the sidepods which Aston Martin have gone for, as well as the cooling louvres.

We have missed that sound!

And Sebastian Vettel was not about to miss out on this action! Could this be the car that puts the four-time World Champion back in contention at the front?

Of course Aston Martin took a risk by launching the actual AMR22 and revealing those key innovations, but as chief technical officer Andy Green explained, they did not want to “deceive” by hiding the real AMR22.

As such, they followed it up with another risk by sending the AMR22 out onto the track, but the team wanted to do so in order to maximise the time available to pick out any issues and work on a fix.

 

Speaking to media including PlanetF1, he said: “We’re shaking down tomorrow and really what we wanted to do was shakedown as early as possible, to check the systems out on the car and give us some time between shakedown and [the] Barcelona test.

“We have time to react – hopefully when we shakedown tomorrow there’s nothing to react to.

“Because the car is absolutely brand new with no carry-over at all [from 2021], and pre-season testing is really short, and the second test is so close to the first race, that it’s going to be almost impossible to react to.

“It just made sense to launch the day before. The car’s effectively ready, so that was the logic behind it.”

 

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Aston Martin

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