Fernando Alonso says Aston Martin is not in the blind about its situation and knows its F1 rivals have developed better than them at the moment.
Since mid-season last year, Aston Martin has seemingly fallen behind some of their F1 rivals. Even with the talks of aggressive development and influx of infrastructure and good money, the team hasn’t necessarily delivered especially when compared to others.
Granted that they are still behind the likes of Ferrari and McLaren in terms of infrastructure and money, but Aston Martin has always punched above its weight. They made an unbelievable jump at the start of 2023 F1 season, but by mid-season it slumped.
McLaren leapfrogged them and has continued to be in front in 2024 along with Red Bull, Ferrari and even Mercedes. The Silverstone-based team has lost somewhere which Alonso says they know about. He says that the team is not in a blind situation.
They know where they are lacking but the issue has been getting that balance to extract the maximum from the car. Often they fall short and it results in getting beaten by the above, even if they are ahead of the curve against Alpine, Visa Cash App RB and more.
“We both have similar feelings on the car and similar comments,” said Alonso. “There are a couple of set-up tools and directions that could improve that, something that we were testing on my car in Imola on Sunday for example. But fundamentally we need to keep working on the balance of the car.
“We added downforce in all the upgrades that we brought to the track but we still cannot use all that downforce in an efficient way in laptime because the balance is maybe not totally perfect in the corners. But I think we understand this. We have a couple of ideas that in the next development of the car and upgrades we’ll try to fix these kinds of problems.
“We are not blind to the dark. We are aware of the situation. But at the same time it’s the nature of these cars as well that as you add downforce they become a little bit more critical and more difficult to drive. And this is something that we need to fix. I think we dropped in performance relative to the others.
“We increased the performance that our car had, but the others seemed to make a step a little bit bigger than us and we dropped a little bit in terms of positions. In my case, I was not perfect in those two races. I was not driving well enough in Miami and in Imola, it was more the search for answers that drives me sometimes on a weekend when I know the goals will not be good enough to satisfy us or myself.
“When you’re not fighting for the top five or top seven or whatever, sometimes you switch into a set-up thing or test weekend because I’d prefer to fix the problems of the car and give up that weekend and start from scratch at the next one than to finish ninth. It’s what happened in Imola a little bit in FP3 and then in qualifying and the race, which obviously on one side is good because maybe we accelerate the fix of the problems a little bit.
“On the other side, that weekend is maybe zero points or you are a little bit less competitive than normal. You need to combine normal weekends where you maximise the package and the points that are available, even if it’s ninth, and some other weekends you need to think, ‘OK, we give up ninth today because we need to shortcut a little bit the times that we have for fixing the car’,” summed up Alonso.
The current showing from Aston Martin shows the complex nature of the sport as per Alonso. Even with the tools like the advanced simulators, the Spaniard feels the track run is the best way to understand the car better, but he credits Lawrence Stroll still for the work he has done behind the scenes to revive the team in the position they are financially.
“The simulator is a little bit more, let’s say forgives you many of the things that the track doesn’t,” said Alonso. “And when you put the numbers, the theoretical numbers on the simulator, you just get faster without too many problems, on balances, something like that. So simulator is great tool for the engineers, for the drivers to learn tracks and things like that.
“But for the last detail of the set-up or the last behaviour on track, I think the simulator is still not as the real car, so yeah, we need to work on Friday, Saturday little bit more now. It still shows, it is a complex sport. McLaren, until Austria, race seven last year, they were fighting for Q1. They have a great team, great people, great facilities, and a great brand behind. They went out of Q1.
“You find something that the car is alive, and then you are changing everything. And it’s the same for us. Last year until mid-season we were the team to look at and to copy. And suddenly you can quickly take two or three steps backwards. So, now we need to focus on ourselves, get back there.
“Different to other teams, we have a great leader with Lawrence. We have not only the owner of the team, but also a very extremely competitive person behind. We will fix things quicker than other teams, I think, thanks to him,” summed up Alonso.
Here’s Fernando Alonso on not being aware he was P11 in Monaco
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