Craig ScarboroughIt’s tricky to review the AMR26 at this stage, as the car has had a delayed start to development and a very troubled testing phase.
That has been compounded by Adrian Newey’s revelation that the car may not even make full distance in the season opening Australian Grand Prix.
Clearly all is not well with the Aston Martin Honda, so we will stick to what we see in the car’s design at this point.
It’s barely been a year since Adrian Newey started at the team. Concept work on the AMR26 started before that and some of that work would be undone by Newey’s arrival.
The team’s top man had already done some 2026 concept work on the Red Bull and then had a prolonged gardening leave to think deeply about what direction to take the new car.
So, the car we see is combination of development sources, with some unchanged ideas, some stop gap solutions and some future AMR direction.
Even at this stage of evolution the car is a well-advanced design, certainly up with any of the top 4 teams in aerodynamic philosophies.
But therein lies some of the problems the team has been facing. It’s fair to say the team in various guises has been a strong midfield team but it is now equipped to rise up to challenge the top teams. Or be the top dog itself.
Doing this takes the money and facilities that have been provided by Lawrence Stroll.
Then comes the next requirement, the skills and experience. This is an entirely new car with a new power unit, but also a new gearbox, having run Mercedes Units for many years.
Then, there’s the detail challenges in packaging more into smaller spaces. This creates problems with heat, vibration and reliability.
There will be dozens of small challenges like this, but the team are faced with a bigger one, which is the much talked about vibration.
There still isn’t enough information about where the vibrations come from. It’s oversimplifying to say it’s merely from the engine.
Every part of an F1 car is like a spring, nothing is infinitely stiff. So every assembly has a natural frequency, a point where the structure will vibrate uncontrollably.
So, the source could be engine, transmission or even suspension. Its been well documented that this is breaking the engine and its battery.
If the source vibration can’t be cured, then short term solutions could include isolating systems from the vibration, making parts more resilient or even just shifting the frequency of the source vibration.
Now looking towards the car, the AMR26 is quite extreme in its aero solutions. All of the car’s surfaces, have been considered and adapted to the new regulations.
Starting at the nose tip, it’s a deep chinned design that mounts to the front wing’s middle plane, leaving only the rearmost flap to flatten in straight line mode.
Out towards the endplates, the tyre temperature sensor is neatly integrated into the trailing edge and large stakes are fitted.
It’s been hard to see, but some shaping has been added to the flat footplate under the wing. All these features will help manage the front tyre wake.
Pushrod suspension is what would be expected, but in contrast to the Red Bull, the wishbone inclination is far more aggressive.
The top wishbone starts right on the top of the chassis at the front and rakes down to the lower chassis edge on its trailing leg.
It’s clear that the lower set up uses multilink rather than a wishbone. Another aggressive area is the sidepods – they are tiny and fully undercut.
As with the McLaren, the chassis side is clearly evident all the way under the front half of the pods.
Then the inlets almost point upwards, feeding back to the radiators inside the tight bodywork.
There is also similarity to the Red Bull with the intercooler set up, where a large air-to-air cooler sits above the engine.
It takes heated air from the turbo compressor and cooling it before passing into the engine inlets.
This is part of two solutions that allow the sidepods to be so small, the other being the large cooling outlet on the sides of the engine cover.
Just as the front suspension is angled for aerodynamic gain, so too is the rear suspension.
While not a new solution for Newey at Red Bull, the rear legs of the upper wishbone sit very high and horizontal.
This requires a pair of vertical extensions to the gearbox case, which then sit either side of the exhaust tailpipe.
Its solutions like that this that test the engineers at the Silverstone factory, as there’s both structural and thermal challenges to be met.
How the team’s season pans out is still hard to predict.
It could be a tough year with lots of technical hurdles to overcome, or the ‘vibration’ issue could soon be solved, and the car can then go on to fulfil the potential that the design promises.
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