Aston Martin F1’s position this season is a concern for both the team and its owner, Lawrence Stroll: although the company remains fifth in the Constructors’ Championship, it has managed just four points in the last three races. The Monaco Grand Prix was the first stage of the season in which Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll finished outside the top ten.
Now the team from Silverstone is inferior to its closest rivals, namely Mercedes, already 52 points, and Visa RB is gradually catching up – the gap is reduced to 20 points. A year ago, at this stage of the season, Aston Martin was third in the team standings, having scored 154 points over the first eight stages, with Alonso reaching the podium six times. But this season his best result remains 5th place in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
By the way, Fernando is also not very fast in qualifying, and the score of his duels with his partner is equal – 4:4.
However, as the German publication Auto Motor und Sport writes, team manager Mike Krak said before the start of the weekend in Monaco that it would be incorrect to draw parallels with the first half of last season: “Then in the winter off-season, other teams, unlike us, have not done their homework properly. That situation created high expectations and now we are measured against this standard.”
However, at the start of last season, Aston Martin’s car made an excellent impression, handling both fast and slow corners well. But with each successive series of technical updates, the speed dropped, the efficiency of the chassis decreased and it turned out that the new products only work normally on certain circuits.
This year’s car has different characteristics: it is more suitable for fast corners than for slow ones, although last year the picture was often the opposite. And now the tires on the AMR24 operate under higher loads, which partly helps with qualifying, but leads to increased wear over the race distance. Alonso and Stroll complain that there is oversteer when entering corners, which turns into understeer at the top.
In addition, the team has structured its work on new product launches differently: they appear more often, at almost every stage. The updates presented at Suzuka and Imola were particularly large-scale.
“Unfortunately everything is relative,” complains Fernando Alonso. – If we add half a tenth, our opponents will add almost 0.2 seconds. As a result, results continue to deteriorate. Over the past few weeks, our program has been driven by the need to find answers. Sometimes it’s better to sacrifice ninth place, but learn something important about the car.”
However, Krak calls on not to dramatize the situation: “Three races ago we started twice from third position in China. But the results are now so compact that you can end up anywhere – between 5th and 16th. At the same time, Imola and Monte Carlo are special circuits. To appreciate the latest innovations, we must therefore wait for the next races.”
Dan Fallows, technical director of the team, explained that the series of updates presented during the Imola phase are not intended to eliminate chassis shortcomings, but mainly to make the overall behavior of the AMR24 more predictable. At the same time, the team is trying to deal with the increased tire wear, although the race in Monaco showed that this still hinders the drivers: Alonso had to take his foot off the gas more often than others to get to the finish line. a set of medium tires.
It must be admitted that many difficulties arise only on a real track, and Fernando Alonso drew attention to this: “On the simulator, many nuances are hidden. McLaren, Ferrari and Visa RB are also aware of this. But all three teams were able to improve when they really discovered the causes of the problems: in the case of McLaren last year it happened in Austria, in the case of Ferrari in Zandvoort, in the case of AlphaTauri in Singapore.”
After that, the results of all three mentioned teams really went up, as their engineers were able to identify the weak points of the chassis and concentrated their efforts on achieving optimal behavior of the car in different types of corners. It seems Aston Martin hasn’t reached that point yet.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
