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How can Aston Martin keep pace with their rivals this year?
On the cusp of pre-season testing ahead of the 2024 Formula 1 season, it is worth going back in time.
A year ago the grid descended upon Bahrain International Circuit for pre-season testing before the 2023 F1 season. It did not take long for two things to become apparent. First, Red Bull was on the front foot. The RB19 was already dialed in, and as the season would show, that car would be the dominant package throughout the 2023 campaign.
Second?
Aston Martin had something up their sleeves as well.
In hindsight it should not have been a surprise. After all the AMR23, Aston Martin’s challenger for the 2023 season, was their first design under new Technical Director Dan Fallows, who joined the team from … you guessed it, Red Bull. Fallows oversaw an “aggressive” vision for the AMR23, and when the result was some early-season podiums from Fernando Alonso alongside a pair of RB19s, it led many — including Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner — to remark that there were three Red Bulls on the podium.
Indeed, Aston Martin began on the front foot a year ago. Alonso and teammate Lance Stroll both finished in the points in the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, with Alonso on the podium, and the team headed to Saudi Arabia in second place in the Constructors’ Standings. They were still in second following the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the fourth race of the season, and entered the Monaco Grand Prix believing Alonso might finally grab his elusive 33rd grand prix victory.
However, it was not to be. Alonso finished second, and a double-points finish from Lewis Hamilton and George Russell saw Mercedes pull within one point of Aston Martin for P2 in the Constructors’. Mercedes pulled ahead of Aston Martin for good following the British Grand Prix, and Ferrari would soon follow. Eventually, instead of looking up the table at Ferrari, Red Bull, and Mercedes, Aston Martin was forced to look in the rear-view mirror, which was filled the the papaya orange from McLaren.
Eventually McLaren passed them as well, and Aston Martin was forced to settle for P5. An improvement to be sure, on their seventh-place finish in 2022, but one that they might look back upon and wonder whether they could have done more.
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2023 highlight: Australian Grand Prix
As we outlined in the previous installment with Alpine, the 2023 Australian Grand Prix was a chaotic affair, one that saw Alpine’s duo of Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly crash into each other in a late-stage restart that knocked both out of the points. A bitter end to a long day.
Things were much better on Aston Martin’s side of pit lane. Both drivers survived the late-lap crash to finish in the points, as the team banked their best result of the entire season.
For Alonso, he began the season with three-straight P3 finishes, the third coming in Australia.
But finishing just behind him was Stroll, who bounced back from a points-less finish in Saudi Arabia for a fourth-place finish of his own. That would go down as his best result during the entire 2023 campaign.
“This sport is a rollercoaster of emotions sometimes! Overall, we’ve come away from a chaotic race with a solid haul of points for the team and to be second in the Constructors’ Championship after three races is very positive,” said Stroll following the race.
2023 lowlight: Singapore Grand Prix
On the other side of the ledger for Aston Martin a year ago?
Singapore.
When the week drew to a close, the team was forced to simply view the Singapore Grand Prix as a “testing” weekend. A hard crash during qualifying knocked Stroll out of Q1, and he was unable to participate in the Singapore Grand Prix.
As for Alonso, he advanced to Q3 and started the race in P7, but in the race, “everything that could go wrong did go wrong for us,” as Alonso noted after the Grand Prix. He was given a penalty for crossing the pit entry line, and then later in the race he endured a very slow pit stop, which saw him rejoin the fight in last place.
He finished in P15.
“It has been a really tough couple of days for the team in Singapore,” said Team Principal Mike Krack at the time. “We only raced one car today and we look forward to seeing Lance back with us in Japan. Fernando’s race came undone during the Virtual Safety Car when the rear jack did not engage properly during the pitstop. We need to analyse exactly what happened.
“Even without this issue, scoring points would have been difficult today. We will move on and learn from these difficult days.”
Outlook for 2024:
Ahead of the 2024 F1 season, there is one word floating around Aston Martin.
Development.
As noted above, the team began the year on the front foot with the AMR23. But as the season wore on, the team struggled with upgrading the AMR23, and began to turn their focus to the 2024 campaign. They used certain races as glorified testing sessions, and began refining their vision for the AMR24.
“I think it’s no secret that we took a pragmatic approach to the end of last season,” Fallows told the media following the launch of the AMR24. “We wanted to make sure that we used every opportunity to really learn the lessons that we needed to learn on AMR23.”
The team hopes that the decisions made down the stretch in 2023 will pay off in a big way, not just at the start of 2024, but throughout the entire season.
“We recognised that we needed to do something that was going to teach us lessons for 2024 and we did. And I think to come out of that having achieved good performances towards the end of the season, culminating in a podium in Brazil and [fifth] place [in the championship], which was a great result for us, and then to come out of that and then to obviously have that momentum going into this year, I think that was the really key bit for us,” added Fallows. “Having been through that process and continuing that momentum into ’24, I think gives us a lot of confidence going into this season.”
Development is the critical issue facing Aston Martin this year. They started 2023 on the right note, but faded down the stretch. If they can keep pace with their rivals with upgrades throughout 2024 to the AMR24, they might be able to keep pace with them on the track as well.
“We’re very pleased with the step that we’ve made over the winter,” Fallows said. “We think we have made a step on last year’s car, which is what we wanted. But in truth, it is a short off-season. And we were developing things that were relevant for this year quite late on into last season. So the main aim for us is really to make sure that this car is a good platform to put those developments on during the season.
“We’ve seen, particularly last season, but also the season before, the in-season development races is absolutely fierce, and we want to be as competitive in that as we have been going into the new season. So that’s what we’ve been really focussed on is to make sure that we’ve got a good, stable basis for us to go and develop the car and keep those updates coming and keep the performance coming.”
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Person under the most pressure to perform in 2024: Lance Stroll
Without question the person at Aston Martin under the most pressure to perform is Stroll.
Aston Martin finished the year with 280 points, 206 of which came from Alonso. The veteran driver accounted for 74% of the team’s points, the third-most on the grid last year. (Alex Albon accounted for 27 of the 28 points Williams scored a season ago, good for 96%, while Nico Hülkenberg notched 9 of Haas’ 12 points, good for 75%).
Development is certainly a critical issue for Aston Martin this season. But if they truly want to fight their way up the grid, they will need to get more from Stroll in 2024.
