While team principal Mike Krack wants Aston Martin to improve its car in all areas and progress further up the competitive order in Formula 1, he cautions that the team “should not go into full destruction mode” in the process.
Aston Martin has scored 12 points in the past two races in Singapore and Azerbaijan, having picked up just six points from the four rounds before that. Those last two results have come courtesy of impressive performances from Fernando Alonso but Aston Martin has been well off the pace of the top four teams and Krack says the overall level of competitiveness is something the team needs to address.
“Everyone is putting upgrades on, removing part of them, or removing them all, going back to a previous spec, so the subject is not an easy one,” Krack said. “I wish we would be in a different position but we are not. Maybe others have also understood [development] quicker than we did. We have to be self-critical — these results we have should not hide the fact we are not where we want to be.
“Now we should not go into full destruction mode as a team, but we have to make sure that the positive results we are accumulating are not hiding from the facts we have to improve, or that we are not where we wanted to be.
“And that is critical as a whole team, as from the outside you see you are scoring, scoring, scoring, scoring, but the four teams ahead of us are always scoring more than three or four times the points per race and that is what we are seeing at the end of the day.”
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Like many teams, Krack says there is likely to be an upgrade introduced for the upcoming United States Grand Prix that will target a wide area of the car’s performance rather than one specific weakness.
“I mean, there’s a couple of problems with the current car,” he conceded. “Up and down the pit lane it’s the same — the downforce and the balance, and in which order it depends on what kind of corners and circuits you’re having. [In Singapore] and Baku it’s short corners, Monza’s last corner is never stopping, but we have to improve both, as both are not good enough.
“I think it’s both [mechanical and aerodynamic], and it’s always difficult to completely discern them but we have to make a good step in both, because from the debrief the drivers are not happy either when the speed is very low.”
Aston Martin is comfortably fifth in the constructors’ championship again this season but has a best result of fifth place this year, compared to eight podiums — three of them runner-up finishes — in 2023.