When speaking to media during his first trackside appearance at the Monaco Grand Prix with Aston Martin, Adrian Newey made an alarming claim that the team will need two years to overcome a correlation issue with the simulator.

Fernando Alonso, though, disagrees. In fact, he argued that every other team is facing similar issues with their simulators.

Alonso denies Adrian Newey ‘two years’ claim

Adrian Newey made his first trackside appearance as Aston Martin’s lead designer at the Monaco Grand Prix, during which time he took an opportunity to speak with media about how he’s found his first few months with the team.

While he admitted he’d enjoyed his time with Aston thus far, Newey didn’t shy away from the fact that the team will need work to get up to its full competitive power.

“It’s fair to say that some of our tools are weak,” he explained.

“Particularly the driver-in-the-loop simulator needs a lot of work because it’s not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool.”

Driver-in-loop (DIL) simulators are multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art racing sims designed to replicate the performance of a car on track. Teams are able to tweak variables such as track temperature and cloud cover in DIL sims, which should in theory provide a sim driver with ample information about how the car will perform on track.

However, if the DIL sim isn’t correlating to reality, then it can result in poor on-track performance.

Newey claimed that it would likely take two years before the DIL simulator can be tweaked in such a way that it will correlate more accurately to reality.

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Speaking to media, including PlanetF1.com, ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso first took a moment to praise his first trackside working experience with the legendary Adrian Newey.

“It was fantastic,” Alonso said.

“I think the way he sees things on the car, even statically on the pit lane or at the grid, also in the garage spotting some things that we could have done better or do better in the future.

“But also yes, his presence in the meeting room is always special, and I think not intimidating. But I think the level of the team was higher thanks to his presence because everyone was more focused, more into the details of the car. People talking in the meeting, they know that they cannot say anything too far from the truth, because he will spot it.

“I think that was great to witness, and I hope next year, with more races that he will come, we will keep learning from him and getting better as a team.”

Naturally, though, the questions turned to Newey’s claim that Aston Martin will need two years to solve its simulator issues.

While Alonso didn’t deny that Aston has struggled in that regard, he did add, “Well I think all the simulators will have some kind of correlation issues to the real car.

“I don’t think that any team has a perfect simulator that you can trust 100% because the car on the real track and the real life is very dynamic, and keeps changing always corner to corner and session to session.

“There are not two laps on the weekend that are exactly the same because the wind, because the temperature, because the traffic in front — all these kinds of things.

“So when you try to replicate that on a simulator, on a consistent and perfect environment, I think is very different.”

Alonso certainly has a point; the driver-in-loop simulators can only simulate a single car on track. Therefore, teams can really only extrapolate on how they expect a car to perform in traffic, or in rapidly changing conditions. They may have reams of data to work from, but that data won’t perfectly reflect reality.

Due to that, the Spanish driver isn’t convinced it will take two full years to find a solution.

“I think it will take less than two years to fix our simulator,” he said.

“It’s not new. Maybe it’s the first time that an Adrian said in Monaco that on the interview, but rest assured that drivers will mention it a couple of times already.”

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