Aston Martin’s main focus is on matching the development rate of the other front-running teams in 2024, after struggling to do so last year.
the team a huge step forward during 2023 pre-season testing to emerge as the nearest challenger to Red Bull in the early races of the year. Part of that was due to the likes of Mercedes, Ferrarim and McLaren having issues to solve initially, but as those teams recovered then Aston Martin could not retain its position and technical director Dan Fallows says that’s an area the team now wants to improve.
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“We went into this season looking for a step over the winter,” Fallows said. “We wanted to make sure that we did get an improvement – it’s an evolution of last year’s car, we wanted to make sure we did get a strong improvement as well, a strong evolution. We have seen that step, we have seen that’s a benefit so we’re very pleased about that.
“So the most important thing for us is where we go from here. We weren’t 100 percent pleased with what we achieved with our in-season development last year, and we want to make sure that we can compete at the top level in terms of in-season as well.”
The AMR24’s development caught the eye of Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache, but at the same time the RB20 has been a major departure from last year’s design and Fallows says it shows two different attitudes to what each team felt was the best approach.
“We’ve got two years left of this regulation set, so there’s still time for people to catch up and I think we saw the field get a lot closer towards the end of last season, it was starting to get very tight. I can’t speak for what they’re doing, but they obviously felt they needed to make a radical change.
“From our point of view I think we were quite happy with the trajectory of the car right towards the end of last season, and we wanted to carry that on into this season, making sure that we had a good platform to develop, which is what we’re hoping for.”
The positivity surrounding Aston Martin’s starting point also extends to team principal Mike Krack, who praised the reliability and consistency that the team enjoyed during testing.
“It was a very, very good test for us over the three days,” Krack said. “I think the only interruptions we had were with the red flags, so I think we can be quite happy. The car was in a really good state when we arrived here, very reliable high-quality parts so we could do our work that we had scheduled every day, so very happy.“Now it’s about digging, going through the whole days to understand all the results we have achieved and we’re looking forward to the first race.”