Aston Martin takes over not only the engine but also the gearbox and rear suspension from Mercedes, but not the front suspension: Team explains the reasons
The current Aston Martin racing team was already an engine customer of Mercedes under the name Force India. That has not changed in 2022. Sebastian Vettel’s team will continue to buy engines from Mercedes and has also decided to take over the gearbox and the rear suspension from the Silver Arrows.
For the team, this is mainly for practical reasons: “It comes as a nice little package. It fits,” says technical director Andrew Green. In previous years, the Silverstone team had only bought the gearbox and developed its own suspension.
“But the two have been fighting each other for too long,” Green says. That’s why, he says, they decided to use the suspension for which the gearbox was designed for the AMR22.
Unlike Haas, Aston Martin did not want to buy as many parts as possible from another team, but preferred to have as much freedom as possible. For example, they could have taken over the front suspension from Mercedes, but that would have brought with it some disadvantages.
“Then you’re trying to match a chassis with a suspension system that you get late,” Green explains. “We’d have to wait for the suspension to be defined before we could define our own chassis.” And then you’d have to define the chassis in less time than Mercedes because you get the information later.
“And we couldn’t really consider that, especially with the timescales we have,” Green said.
The adopted power unit, on the other hand, is an almost known quantity. “It’s probably the area of the car that has had the least change from 2021 to 2022,” says the engineering boss. Although the engines had to be adapted to the new E10 fuel, “that’s not a significant change. “
