Aston Martin introduced their first batch of major updates during Friday practice for this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix. The new spec AMR22 garnered a lot of attention due to it’s notable similarities to Red Bull’s 2022 challenger. The similarities earned the car the nickname ‘Green Red Bull’, much like the ‘Pink Mercedes’ moniker earned by Racing point in 2020.

The FIA announced that due to the visual similarities between the two cars, it had looked into the Aston Martin design to confirm it’s conformity to the technical regulations, which forbid reverse engineering and IP transfer.

“The investigation, which involved CAD checks and a detailed analysis of the development process adopted by Aston Martin, confirmed that no wrongdoing had been committed, and therefore the FIA considers that the Aston Martin aerodynamic upgrades are compliant,” the FIA said in a statement.

The statement continued to elaborate on the regulations, confirming that taking influence from another team's car, which is a staple of the sport, is allowed for within the regulations.

“Article 17.3 specifically defines and prohibits “Reverse Engineering”, i.e. the digital process of converting photographs (or other data) to CAD models, and prohibits IP transfer between teams, but equally, this Article permits car designs getting influenced by those of competitors, as has always been the case in Formula 1.

“In the analysis we carried out we confirmed that the processes followed by Aston Martin were consistent with this Article’s requirements.”

When questioned about the radical new design introduced by Aston Martin, driver Lance Stroll stated the team had prepared two different philosophies during the winter break.

“Over the winter we had two different philosophies that we developed,”  he said. “We tried the first one car at the first part of the season and we haven’t been as competitive as we wanted to be so there’s this other philosophy car that we had on paper.

“It was a big flat out push for the whole team to get it here for this weekend. Design and manufacture it and get it here to Barcelona. Big thank you to everyone. It was really tough and we’re pretty short on spares and all those things, so it was flat out to get it here this weekend. Hopefully it goes a bit better.”

Team principal Mike Krack said he deems the changes to be in line with a “normal development process”, stating flexibility had been built into the design from the beginning.

“When we had the launch of the car, Andrew Green at the time our CTO, was already mentioning that we had buildings on flexibility on the car, to be able to develop along the journey.

“This is what we have done at the end of the day. From that point of view it was just a normal development process. You will remember we had all of the porpoising difficulties with the other spec of car. From that point of view we said at one point we need to make a little update, and that’s what we did.”