Fernando Alonso Diaz, the Spanish race-car driver who used to compete for Alpine in Formula One, has now joined hands with Aston Martin and has only good things to say about this new association. He made his debut for the new team recently in Abu Dhabi. As per F1 rules, every team is supposed to have two cars on the track, and this season, one of the drivers to represent Aston Martin will be Alonso.

Alonso’s Feedback

In a recent interview, Alonso talked about how he has felt since joining a new team. He said he seems to be a lot more upbeat now; he also added that earlier, he was 90% thrilled when he signed for Aston, 100% when they started to improve and closed the season on a high, and his excitement has only risen since then. He has been pleasantly delighted by everything, but the car for this year isn’t even close to what they will race in the following year, so it’s not the same car. Discussing the balance with the team was fruitful, but they hope the car will be radically different next year.

The Transition

According to Alonso, switching teams is always more difficult since one has to get adjusted to new teammates, working styles, and ideologies. However, the timed lap on the track is ultimately what matters. The adaptation process is almost complete since he believes his first run was 26.6 seconds — just 0.3 seconds slower than his best time. He doesn’t believe there was much of a difference between Alpine and Aston over the weekend, because both had really excellent weekends here, with Sebastian qualifying ahead of him. Alonso believes he won’t need much time to feel at home in the Aston Martin after nearly 100 laps and the third-fastest time when he handed the car over

James Bond had the coolest gadgets and we could not stop talking about them. They would get him out of the craziest situation with such suave and you could not help but ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over it. But the coolest one among them was Vanquish, the Aston Martin that the 007 agent drove in Die Another Day. However, we all knew that it was all fiction, back then. But what if we told you that the vanishing car exists in real life too?

Not So Realistic

Daniel Craig took his final bow with No Time To Die as the James Bond. And people will always remember his films as more realistic. However, realism was not the best way to describe the 2002 film Die Another Day. Even Chris Corbould, the veteran special effects supervisor for about 15 Bond movies said that they took it too far with the inept CGI of the famous (more like infamous) invisible car. In an interview, Corbould said that he wasn’t very keen on it either but went along with creating the CGI for the Aston Martin anyway.

The Irony

As crazy as the idea of a vanishing car may be, the technology of invisibility was based on reality. It was inspired by some work done by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). DERA may be defunct now but it was part of the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Scriptwriters Neil Purvis and Robert Wade had made this discovery as they were researching for this film.

When Reel Become Real

Corbould has always found it amusing to see how reality eventually replicates the gadgets used in the James Bond films. BAE Systems is one of the largest defense and aerospace contractors in the world. They are working on this very invisibility technology. Alongside the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration, they aim to create a system known as Adaptiv, which will be used on tank fleets.