(Motorsport-Total.com) – Lance Stroll steers in. Then he turns the steering wheel even further – until it is almost twisted by 180 degrees. This is shown in short clips from the recent Formula 1 race weekend in Silverstone. Now Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack explains what these extraordinary scenes are about.
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Krack said: “Lance has always been very clear about the front axle. I think he wanted to show that the problem does not come from the front axle itself. Because even at this high speed, the front axle simply does not build up any additional grip – no matter how much steering angle you apply.”
This is clearly visible in the videos: Stroll’s Aston Martin AMR26 understeers so dramatically that even his extreme steering movements have no effect. The car simply continues to push over the front axle.
But what many observers only realized from videos on social networks, Krack experienced live at the Aston Martin command post: “On our screens, [in such incidents] several warning messages are displayed immediately.”
Even comparatively steeply set wings did not help in Silverstone. “We would have needed a lot of grip on the front axle there, but we didn’t have it,” said Krack. “I guess that was Lance’s way of making it clear that this is a weakness of our car.”
How Stroll explains his special steering behavior
Stroll himself said he just wanted to “help. We have instability when braking and turning into medium-fast to slow corners. And then we have this aerodynamic phenomenon – a kind of flow separation between the front wing and the floor. As a result, we suddenly completely lose the front axle in fast corners.”
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This flow separation can be “very difficult to detect or clearly assign” based on the pressure sensors in the vehicle, explained Stroll. “I wanted to give the engineers in Silverstone who work on aerodynamics a better feeling for what we actually feel in the car. Sometimes this simply cannot be recognized from the measurement data alone.”
Why Aston Martin sees such problems positively
Krack explicitly rules out a technical problem with the AMR26, but takes the scenes from Silverstone as an incentive to continue development: “Even if a characteristic is negative, you learn from it that you have to work exactly on this point.”
“I don’t want to classify it too much in black and white. Even a problematic characteristic can ultimately prove to be valuable. You can analyze it and try to eliminate it for the future so that it does not occur again. That’s why I see it not as something negative, but as something positive.”
Even the “handling of these issues” can be profitable in the medium term, said Krack. “We do this at a lower performance level, but that does not change the fundamental approach. It neither changes the approach to optimization nor the work in the simulator. In this respect, nothing really changes.”
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