Dan Fallows: Aston Martin's not-so-secret ingredient in push to F1 glory

F1

Fernando Alonso was the star in Bahrain, but as Tony Dodgins writes, it's due in a large part to factory personnel changes that the Spaniard has been able to shine

4 Aston Martin Dan Fallows 2023 Bahrain GP

Fallows and his team appear to have gone from being Q1 strugglers to podium-finishers in a year

Aston Martin

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Tony Dodgins

Overall, it was super-exciting. Because I hate to see talent wasted. Which, for the past decade, Fernando Alonso has been, before suddenly turning back the clock with a thrilling surge to a podium at the 2023 Bahrain GP last weekend.

Given the variance in F1 equipment it’s hard to ever really know but, for me, as a complete package, Alonso is at least as good as anyone out there. Fernando and Charles Leclerc both need to be in proper cars.

His new team Aston Martin, of course, now has Dan Fallows as its technical director – who many feel has been the not-so-secret ingredient in its heady new competitive brew.

Maybe, just maybe, this could be Fallows’ watershed moment in racing, a first step to emulating what his previous line manager Adrian Newey has managed through three decades of F1.

Aston Martin Fernando ALonso 2023 Bahrain GP

Aston has made a seismic performance leap, further helped by having Alonso at the wheel

Aston Martin

Fallows, who formerly headed the Red Bull aero department under Newey when it dominated from 2010 through 2013, has been allowed to spread his wings as chief technical director at Aston, bringing overall his technical know-how garnered from years at Milton Keynes.

Even Sergio Perez joked after Bahrain that it was “great to see three Red Bulls on the podium.”

After the 2014 hybrid era placed emphasis on the power unit, with Mercedes initially well ahead, last year’s return to ground effect saw the pendulum swing back to aero. The recruitment of Fallows by Lawrence Stroll in June 2021 no doubt required a healthy stipend, but was nonetheless most astute and demonstrated the billionaire’s commitment – manifested in the car’s performance, first envisaged by Fallows when he told F1.com last year that the team they would make a “big step forward” in 2023.

“We set aggressive targets for ourselves and we believe we’ve largely hit those”

“We are pleased with our goal,” said Aston’s tech chief then said after testing. “We targeted making a big step up on last year’s car so in terms of performance relative to that, we’re definitely happy that we have made a step towards that.

“We set aggressive targets for ourselves and we believe we’ve largely hit those. We came out of testing believing that we do have a car that we could work with.”

Andrew Green, with the Silverstone-based team since the Jordan days, deserves huge credit too for the sterling job he did as technical director throughout the Force India/Racing Point era when the team so often punched above its weight at a time when, sometimes, people didn’t quite know if their monthly salary would come through. Green was involved with the current AMR23 also, before taking on a new role for Aston Martin Performance Technologies as the whole operation grows.

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It’s a massively exciting time for the squad, which has grown from 400 – 740 people ahead of a May 1 move into its new factory at Silverstone, which will dramatically increase its resource.

Words like vision, passion and ambition were the ones bandied around Aston last weekend, something which reserve driver Felipe Drugovich mentioned while confirming that, having driven both, the new car is a massive step forward over the ’22 car, not that we needed to be told.

When Alpine was short-sighted enough not to offer Alonso the cash/contract he required, it took Stroll Sr a couple of nanoseconds to swoop, Fernando also enthused by his passion and vision, not to mention little previous evidence of failure.

It was the last piece of the jigsaw, with no disrespect to Sebastian Vettel. Having a driver like Alonso in the cockpit just ups the expectations and focuses minds, everyone knowing that if they find any kind of gain, he’ll exploit it, in what he called “a lovely car to drive.”

4 Aston Martin Fernando Alonso 2023 Bahrain GP

Alonso described AMR23 as a “a lovely car to drive”

Aston Martin

“You’re always expecting that you will get a step back and you will get back to reality,” he said post-race. “But it seems real, the performance.

“What Aston Martin did over the winter to have the second-best car at race one, this is unreal.”

There were those at Ferrari who rated Fernando more highly than Michael Schumacher, notwithstanding a propensity to press the self-destruct button now and again.

On which subject, it’s ironic to find Alonso, Pedro de la Rosa (Fernando’s mate and now an Aston brand ambassador) and Martin Whitmarsh all together again 16 years on from the epicentre of Spygate and McLaren! And hats off to Sky commentator David Croft who regaled a quick chat with Whitmarsh, who’d told Pedro he needed to work free for the rest of his life to pay the bill…

Lance Stroll deserves a pat on the back too – something acknowledged by both his father and Alonso – for the commitment to drive with dodgy wrists and a broken toe, sustained just two weeks previously in a mountain bike accident which medics suggested might rule him out until Azerbaijan. But he’d probably have had a fractured skull to go with them if he’d punctured Ferdy’s left rear at Turn 4 on lap 1!

It was interesting to hear Drugovich, from his Bahrain testing experience, talk not only of Alonso’s speed, but his ability to deliver it with precious little tyre degradation.

That was something he again displayed in what was a typically feisty and relentless race drive. Maybe the capacity of the hard compound Pirelli had something to do with it, but the aggression with which he attacked Lewis Hamilton on new rubber early in the final stint, including a couple of lurid moments in Turn 4, did make you wonder whether he might suffer later in the stint. But there was no sign of that. Which says a lot for the car, too.

3 Aston Martin Fernando ALonso 2023 Bahrain GP

Various teams have warned that Bahrain is an outlier in terms of performance

Aston Martin

While the doom mongers are already writing of ’23 to a season of Red Bull domination, as Christian Horner pointed out, you might be unwise to do that on a sample of one at a track that is widely accepted to be a bit of an outlier.

While it probably is expecting too much for Aston or anyone else to beat Max Verstappen and Red Bull over the year, you felt genuinely chuffed for the guys and girls at Aston Martin when reading the excitement and joy on the faces of some of those who have spent nigh on 35 years of their professional lives with the team. They can really smell an opportunity to develop into a Red Bull.

As for Fernando, well, he might be 41, but he looks good, can be a nightmare for his employers but a bigger one for his foes, is hugely combative, not unduly bothered by convention and, driving an Aston Martin that well, he must be on pole to be the next James Bond.

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