McCullough: Rapid growth is not painless

At the FIA ​​press conference in Brazil, Tom McCullough, who is responsible for car modernization at Aston Martin F1, spoke about the reason for the decline in the team’s results, which has been observed throughout the autumn.

Tom McCullough: “Obviously our form at the end of the year is a little disappointing, but let’s take a step back and remember where we were a year ago and how we started this year. The team continues to grow, and since this is very rapid growth, it is never painless.

It takes time to interact with new people. In addition, this year there will be a move to the first of three buildings of our new base – I believe this started after the Spanish Grand Prix. At the beginning of the year, when the move started, there was still a construction site there, we occupied only the top floor and work was still going on downstairs.

Now that the first building is completely finished, the construction of a new wind tunnel is also progressing quickly, this is building no. 3, and the construction of the second building has already started. Overall, we are now going through a phase of very intensive growth and at the same time we are competing with the best Formula 1 teams.

At the start of the year we tried to compete with the top teams, but could we make the same progress as them throughout the season? No. Does this upset us? Yes. But I believe we continue to learn, and the way the team is growing promises good prospects for the future.

If we give both our drivers good cars, if the team runs smoothly all weekend and there are no random circumstances that get in the way, then Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll are perfectly capable of earning points.

Our biggest problems this year are not about the drivers, and they are not always about the performance of the car. Sometimes problems arose, sometimes bad tactical decisions were made. Sometimes we took risks in qualifying and had to pay for it.

Fernando joined the team recently, but he is a fantastic, high-level professional. He pushes us, he is extremely motivated and understands very well the difficulties we have to overcome. It is very difficult to refine a car while competing with the strongest teams at the pace of modernization, but Fernando showed himself excellently.

As for Lance, the easiest way to say is that he’s unlucky. But it started during the third race of the season, when his car suffered a defect in the exhaust system, and he was unable to earn any points there, although he did earn them. Conditions have been against him in recent races. For example, in Suzuka his rear wing broke and Lance had nothing to do with it. That. even when the car allowed him to fight for points, he often failed to earn them, but through no fault of his own.

But I think he will have a chance to qualify for points in Brazil. We now fully understand how to proceed to unlock the full potential of the AMR23 and are fully focused on preparing for the remaining races. We will try to earn as many points as possible and as the weekend progresses we will spend much less time testing new technical solutions.”