Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel have taken the wheel of the Aston Martin AMR22 in a ‘filming day’ at Silverstone to become the first drivers to sample a 2022 Formula 1 car.
The British marque released its all-new machine in an event on Thursday, showing off the fully-blown race car to the world.
It was the first glimpse at a current-spec machine after Haas revealed renderings from an earlier stage of development and Red Bull launched with what amounted to a show car.
“We’re not trying to deceive,” said Andrew Green, Aston Martin’s chief technical officer when asked why the team revealed the full-fat ’22 car.
“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.”
Green said the team also elected for an early launch date to maximise the time available to find and resolve any issues that might arise from the brand-new car.
It’s why Stroll and Vettel were on track in Silverstone on Friday, the day after the launch, to give the AMR22 its first outing.
The Canadian was out on track first before handing the car over to his four-time world champion team-mate.
Under Formula 1’s rules, teams are allowed to perform promotional ‘filming’ days, though running is limited to 100km on tyres that are unrepresentative of those used during a race or official test.
Nonetheless it provides an early opportunity to complete some basic systems checks before the squad gets to Barcelona for the first pre-season test later this month.
Other teams are expected to follow suit in utilising a ‘filming day’ before the official running commences.
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