Aston Martin started the 2024 season as the fifth-best team. While their position hasn’t been hampered, they’ve lost loads of performance to the competition ahead. Amid the slump, Fernando Alonso and Mike Krack came out with an optimistic outlook for the forthcoming upgrades. However, Performance Director Tom McCullough believes that the top four levels of performance will be hard to achieve.
“Now we have a plan, let’s see if it contributes to a better result. But we’re more confident than we have been in the previous months,” said Alonso as he hoped to resolve the issues with new upgrades and setup guidelines.
Fernando Alonso accepts his last two race weekends haven’t been good enough, but says he’s still tried to make them worthwhile for Aston Martin as it attempts to get the most from its #F1 upgrades and improve the AMR24 – even if that means he has to “give up that weekend”. pic.twitter.com/F1sVc4piir
— The Race (@wearetherace) May 23, 2024
Mike Krack shared Alonso’s hopes for getting better as he added, “I share his optimism. The results are encouraging and it’s just about the time until we have everything.”
However, Tom McCullough, although optimistic, shares the reality of the situation. “We know what we’re trying to achieve, it’s just quite hard to achieve it. And that is the bottom line, both mechanically and aerodynamically”, said McCullough according to The Race. With the new premises still under construction, it seems like a transitional phase for the Silverstone team.
Aston Martin has never been open about what the actual problem of the car is, unlike McLaren who revealed slow-speed corners as their weakness, and Ferrari identified tire wear as theirs. One actually doesn’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and what exactly Aston Martin is trying to resolve that’ll make the car faster.
However, if we look at the performance charts, Aston Martin isn’t way off the gap to leaders when compared with 2023. The team is somewhere five to six-tenths down on performance. It’s just that the competition has improved significantly and filled in that gap, putting Aston Martin in the midfield.
Why has Aston Martin fallen into the midfield despite the performance gap to Red Bull remaining the same
Red Bull was the class of the field last year winning races by a country mile. However, come the end of the season, McLaren somewhat caught the Milton Keynes outfit. Red Bull understood that the potential of the RB19, even in its most evolved state, would not be able to fight against the competition. Hence, the new RB20 platform was introduced.
Red Bull was right as Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes have all drastically caught up to them. McLaren was the closest competitor and brought a major upgrade package in Miami that put them right up with Red Bull. Ferrari was next with their huge Imola GP upgrades putting them also in contention for wins. The Scuderia upgrade was so big that some called the car with the upgrades the SF24 Evo.
The latest entry was Mercedes, who were fighting with Aston Martin for the lower trenches of the points earlier this season. The new front wing and floor seem to have propelled them near the top. Aston Martin brought major upgrades at the Japanese GP followed by another huge package at the Imola GP.
However, the upgrades failed to work as intended by the team. With the competition moving closer to Red Bull, Aston Martin has been left behind. Seemingly, Aston Martin and Red Bull are the only teams who haven’t improved drastically since the start of the season. The saving grace for Red Bull was the fact that they had a buffer to start the season with.
