Fernando Alonso doesn’t think Aston Martin had high expectations despite the results of F1 2023, as he talks about 2025 car and gap to teams ahead.
Aston Martin had a dream start in 2023 when Alonso ended up on podium for several races until their mid-season slump to drop down the pecking order. They hoped for a re-build in 2024 which they had for a brief period at the start, but had a similar slump from mid-season onward.
The difference between 2023 and 2024 was lack of podium finishes in the latter but they still finished fifth behind the Top 4 teams and comfortably ahead of the rest of the pack. In terms of the expectations, Alonso says they didn’t have one last year as such.
“I don’t think that the expectations were too high,” said Alonso to media. “We did a very strong campaign in 2023, and people were expecting us to fight for bigger things, or at least to be at the level that we were at the beginning of 2024. And this is normal. This is Formula 1, and we want to be there as well. You know, we didn’t succeed, the second part of the year. We are aware of that.
“But we are not ashamed of that. We are working towards fighting for the championship in the future and the second part of the year we didn’t maybe bring to the circuit what we thought that it was in the pipeline. But at the same time, we have finished, some of the facilities in Silverstone, with building two and three of the factory, the wind tunnel will be soon operating.
“And we have Adrian Newey on board, so. It was not a bad 2024,” summed up Alonso, who doesn’t have much information on how the 2025 car will turn out to be. They ran several configurations in 2024 to fine tune the car and with the regulations not changing much, Aston Martin doesn’t have much to play with. He notes that the base of 2025 will not be the 2023 car, but a new one.
“I don’t know much,” said Alonso. “I don’t know exactly what will be the characteristics of the car. As I said before, all the learnings that we are took into 2024, the struggles, I think are well in place into 2025. So, all the things that we didn’t succeed last year, I think they are better for this year. I don’t think that the car will be the base of 2023. I don’t think so.
“I think it’s just a completely new project for ‘25 which hopefully delivers better results than the 2024 car. But we are aware of also the gap with the top four teams. They are in a little bit in another league. So, I think there is a lot of work to do, but there’s still some time for the first race and first proper test. We have the right people. We have the right facilities and we have the good learnings. So, I’m confident to start the season strong and to have a good 2025,” summed up Alonso.
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