Aston Martin technical director Dan Fallows says his team set some "fairly aggressive" development targets for its 2023 challenger, most of which have been achieved.
Aston's AMR23 was the revelation of pre-season testing last week in Bahrain. But the car has upheld its remarkable pace – on short and long runs - so far this weekend in the hands of the always combative Fernando Alonso.
Rather than opting for a soft evolution of last year's machine, Aston's design team, led by Fallows and which includes former Mercedes aero chief Eric Blandin, followed a bolder path, with 95% of the car featuring new parts, an unusually high number given F1's regulation status quo.
©AstonMartin
And the team's audacity looks like it will pay off, although Fallows is much more cautious in terms of predicting the AMR23's performance relative to its rivals ahead of Sunday's race.
"Firstly, we are pleased with the car," said Fallows. "We targeted making a big step on last year's car. So in terms of the performance relative to that, we're definitely happy that we have made a step forwards.
"And we set some fairly aggressive targets for ourselves. And we did sort of largely hit those.
"And we came out of testing believing that we did have a car that we could work with, but where we sit relative to other people, I know you'd love me to give you a prediction, but I'm afraid we just simply don't know."
A team's first order of business in pre-season testing is to validate a design's correlation, or in basic terms, match the data that is measured off the car against the data previously collected at the factory, during simulation.
Fallows says Aston's car passed that test with flying colors last week.
©AstonMartin
"The key thing for us going into testing was to make sure that the car on track is doing roughly what we expected from the wind tunnel numbers and from our simulations," he said.
"I think it's always gratifying as a technical team to have a car on the circuit which is kind of what you were expecting.
"And for us that's really what testing showed us, which is good. The car, it's relatively predictable.
"It's kind of doing the things we want it to do so that was a very positive thing for us. I think in terms of relative performance, it's really difficult to say," added the former Red Bull aero engineer.
"I'm delighted there's a lot of excitement around the team, but really, things are done so differently by different teams in testing that it's really this weekend that we get some inclination of how good the car is.
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