“Some aero devices, like the floor, like the splitter and diffuser, were a challenge because for a track it’s not difficult but for a road car you need to go over speed bumps and have some maintenance of those where it’s a nice shape on the bodywork. Some of those were a challenge or a question mark whether it was worth putting them into a road-legal car but everything came alive and more or less everything we asked for is in the car.
“And I think it is 100kg less than the Valour, which is a big number to achieve. When you say 100kg, they initially say no, and you need to take 1kg here, 1.5kg there, you can drop 20kg and 100kg is a big ask but eventually it was achieved.”
How involved are you in the process of getting weight out or tuning the car?
“Not so much: the team is capable. For me, they were more in contact with more of the F1 team than me personally. The relationship between the Aston Martin F1 team and the road car team has been a little bit closer than ever for this car in terms of using some of the materials we use in the F1 team.
“Some of the weight savings that we do, especially in the F1 team, is on the highest parts of the car, because you can lower the centre of gravity. So places like the cockpit, the seat, the steering wheel, the console – those are key places in F1 because you lower the centre of gravity and they feed back that into the road car version. I think the seat and the cockpit is a big change between the Valour and the Valiant.”
You could be racing for I don’t know how long, but could you imagine a second career in designing road cars?
“I would say no because I think it is much more complex to design road cars than help a racing team on a weekend, which is where I can help Aston Martin in the future. I will race for a few more years but my Aston Martin contract is for the long term and, after my driving duties, I can help the team more in a race weekend, helping the drivers to go into the weekend at different phases of the calendar, to stay fit, to stay focused, weekend assistance, race decisions – intermediate tyres/wet tyres – I think I’m more useful in that area than road cars.
“But I will be happy always to test cars. I think since I joined Aston Martin, the thing that I love is that in the DBX, the handling, that car has no roll, no pitch. That platform is super-stable and I’m always surprised when I drive that car. It’s the car I drive in Monaco, and is the car that I love from all the Aston Martins, so I think that kind of feedback, that’s something the team can benefit from.”
