Fernando Alonso’s first year in second free practice at the inaugural Formula 1 GP in Bahrain in 2023 must be viewed with caution.

But it seems to confirm that Aston Martin has the potential to become the fourth pole – alongside Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes – at the pinnacle of the sport.

This year’s AMR23 is the first car to be fully signed by Fallows. The Briton, who is the technical director of the Silverstone team, was at the center of a long-running dispute between Red Bull and Aston Martin when he decided last year to leave the former (where he held the position of head of aerodynamics) in sign for the latter.

For many years he was the closest associate of Adrian Newey, the most successful F1 designer of the past three decades.

Inevitably, the AMR23 has been dubbed the “green Red Bull” by many, but that couldn’t be further from the truth – although Fallows does admit to being influenced by Newey.

“I’m one of the lucky people to have worked with Adrian and seen his methods.” said Fallows. “He has a very clear approach to the way he designs and develops a car, particularly aerodynamically. We all know that this approach is uncompromising and he is totally focused on the small details.

One of the things I liked about working with him was that he lacked the slightest technical arrogance. He’s open to new ideas or things that didn’t work or that there are better ideas out there. Regardless of where these comments came from (referring to the ‘green Red Bull’), I certainly tried to contribute my own work and encouraged our technical team to be open-minded.

Even if you have a clear idea of ​​how you want to develop certain things in the car or have clever ideas about it, you have to be careful not to get too technical. If someone suggests something better, whoever it is, be open-minded. That’s one of his (Newey’s) great strengths and I hope to continue that.”he added.

Referring to the Aston Martin AMR23’s design resemblance to the Red Bull RB19, the 49-year-old Briton said it was inevitable – under the new regulations that will be introduced in 2022: “I don’t want to go into the regulations but they have certain limitations and it’s inevitable that some cars will look the same. Basically, it’s the little details that make a big difference.

Sometimes these aren’t necessarily visible so we’ll see the cars converge, that’s going to happen with every rulebook and there’s no doubt. What we’ve seen over the last year is that some teams have decided to follow one of the two obvious big design philosophies and started making them work. So they’ll probably continue to do that.”

The ‘green Red Bull’ nickname was born in Barcelona last year when Aston Martin unveiled the ‘B’ version of the AMR22, which looked identical to the 2022 Red Bull RB18. But that was only the first step. The Silverstone team entered the Red Bull philosophy, gathered valuable data for the rest of 2022 and further developed this philosophy to produce AMR23.

It was a process of almost a year, which is a very short amount of time, to create a brand new design philosophy and develop it to the point where it becomes a star in the sport. Courage was required and that’s exactly what Aston Martin did from the moment it started developing the AMR23.

Fallows himself admitted that this year the Silverstone team managed to achieve the “particularly aggressive goals” they set for the design of this year’s car for Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.

“We are very satisfied with our goals. We wanted to make a big step up from last year’s car so we’re definitely happy with that in terms of performance. We set ourselves aggressive goals and I think we’ve mostly achieved them.” We are confident from the tests in (Bahrain) that we have a car that we can work with.” explained the Brit.

Two days ago Fernando Alonso tried to keep things low by saying that “You can’t catch up with the big teams in a week”. Fallows wanted to do the same and said: “It is sometimes very difficult for a medium-sized team to compete with the big teams at all levels, especially in terms of facilities and tools.

So it’s extremely important that we try to focus on the strengths that we have. Some people have been with Aston Martin for a long time, but the team has evolved. This is one of our great strengths. We have an incredibly talented and passionate group of people.”completed.