Aston Martin F1, yesterday, officially started their 2022 F1 campaign by revealing a track-ready AMR2022 during a presentation event at the company’s Gaydon supercar manufacturing facility. It has become a trend within Formula 1 for teams to use pre-season car launches as a sponsorship-driven livered message. This is done to make the sponsors happy and also to keep certain, secretive elements of design hidden from rival teams until the first test campaign. With AMR22 Aston Martin F1 clearly revealed a car that is ready to test from day one. It looked like a fully developed car ready for action and indeed Aston Martin confirmed it was.

Formula One is going through a radical change of regulations for 2022, pertaining predominantly to aerodynamics and larger 18-wheels. Regulations mandating the V6 hybrid engine are effectively frozen. Aston Martin will have pre-determined a schedule of updates through the course of the season.

The AMR22 is sure to receive updates before the first race of the season at the Bahrain Grand Prix on March 18. Because the 2022 rules are so sweeping, it makes sense not to be concerned with revealing all, because no one team will have an out-of-the-box advantage. Aston Martin’s chief technical officer spoke to the assembled media.

Andy Green:

“We had a car available. We didn’t want to do a livery launch, we’re beyond doing livery launches this year – we wanted to do the real thing.”

“We’re shaking down tomorrow [March 11 2022] and really what we wanted to do was shakedown as early as possible, to check the systems out on the car and give us some time between shakedown and the Barcelona test.”

“Because the car is absolutely brand new with no carry-over at all from 2021, and pre-season testing is really short, and the second test is so close to the first race, that it’s going to be almost impossible to react to.”

“We have time to react – hopefully when we shakedown tomorrow there’s nothing to react to.”