One of the most exciting and rewarding winters spent working through an unprecedented car design revolution in F1 now leads into an exciting pre-season testing programme for Aston Martin Aramco Congizant Formula One™ Team.
The AMR22 has already been revealed to fans around the world, but now it's down to the men and women in our race team to truly understand the AMR22 and begin a constant evolution throughout the year.
It's a daunting challenge and one that only provides the team with six days of running to get to grips with the car ahead of the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, beginning with this week's sessions in Barcelona on February 23-25.
While the car concept has been through simulation and various offline tools for over a year now, nothing compares to physical on-track running.
AMR22: Tech insights
The new era of Formula One has arrived. Designed to produce better racing, and heralding the return of ground effect, the AMR22 represents F1's biggest design revolution in decades.
Performance Director Tom McCullough is your guide to understanding the weeks ahead for the team across Barcelona and Bahrain.
"Six days [of testing] is nothing for such a big regulation change," he says. "It's slightly daunting, really.
"When a set of regulations as big as this comes out, you don't actually know where you're going to end up with the performance of the car [initially].
"So compared to previous years, where the regulation changes have been relatively small, or at least [geared] around the same philosophy, this time they've ripped up the book and started again. It's a full ground-effect car.
"When you start the design process, you don't know, for example, the load you're going to be designing the car to, because you don't know how much performance you're going to find.
"As we were designing this car, we didn't know too much about the 18-inch Pirelli tyres. There was a bit of mule car testing during the season, there's bits and bobs of data, but there's a constant iterative approach [going forward].
"Once the season starts, there's going to be quite a bit of development, reacting to the problems you've got, reacting to solutions other people have got.
"It's going to be very different to previous years."
Sights and sounds of an F1 2022 car
Turn up the volume and immerse yourself in the sights and sounds of a new F1 era, as the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One™ Team AMR22 hits the track at Silverstone.
The season of data gathering kicks up a gear when the teams arrive in Spain and Bahrain.
With limited running in allocated sessions, as well as potentially unpredictable scenarios such as weather changes and on-track delays, time is of the essence in understanding every facet of car performance.
Teams will seek to validate their car design against their software predictions, evaluate upgrade paths, complete significant running across multiple tyre compounds, conduct qualifying and race simulations, and plenty more.
"There's a lot of planning that goes into the six days of testing, we have a lot of things to sign off," says Tom.
"At the end of the day, if a car doesn't run reliably, you don't get to the end of the race and then it doesn't matter. So, you need to get the car running reliably.
"We can do some reliability testing off the car, but there's nothing like getting everything together on the car and onto the track.
"We've got the engine installation; we've got totally new aerodynamics and the loads it puts into the mechanical side of the car. We've got to understand the new tyres.
"We've planned how we are going to correlate our development tools, the windtunnel and all the CFD, the tyre understanding that we have.
"Unfortunately, when we go to the track, it's not a controlled environment. The track temperature, the wind, we can control all of that in the simulator.
"When you go into the real world, you don't know if it's going to be icy in the morning. You don't know what track temperatures are going to be. You don't know when the winds going to blow and change."
Testing is about taking all the data we get from the car across a bespoke test plan, split up into every lap and every set of tyres.
Those instances mean the team must always be prepared, prioritising its programme and retaining enough flexibility to recover should a loss of running time be incurred.
"You have to set a plan, collecting the priority data that we need to gather at the end of each test," says Tom.
"That helps us to be able to understand what we've got to feed back into the development function, and to highlight anything that’s potentially miscorrelating.
"A lot of testing is about taking all the data we get from the car across a bespoke test plan, which is split up into every single lap and every single set of tyres.
"It's all valuable information, so throughout an entire test plan, we are hopefully gathering all that data.
"If the car's reliable and there's no red flags, or bad weather, then that's ideal.
"But at the end of it all, hopefully, we've got all the information we need. We never quite have everything we want. We always want too much, but that's the job!"
Follow us on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram at @AstonMartinF1, and join us on Facebook and YouTube at @AstonMartinF1Team for coverage of this week's testing.
All in. All welcome. All celebrated. Sign up to open up a world of I / AM benefits and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
