Aston Martin started 2023 with a bang taking home six podiums and having the second fastest car on the grid consistently. However, since the Canadian Grand Prix the team have found themselves stuck in no man’s land.
Given their performance in Hungary, it seems the Aston Martin is now the fifth fastest car. Fernando Alonso suggested that their lack of pace was due to the new Pirelli tyre compounds, but team management including Aston Martin team principal, Mike Krack, is sceptical about that.
“That would be an easy excuse, wouldn’t it?” Krack said.
Instead, Krack believes that the AMR23 is suffering from unintended “side effects” of their upgrades.
“The way we have developed the car, it’s very complex,” Krack said. “You change one thing, but you never change one thing and everything else is fine. You always have side effects when you do changes.
“And you need to weigh up: do you use, for example, a part that makes more downforce but has a different character, or vice versa. And we think that in one or two situations we have done not the right choice.”
The team realised after the Hungarian GP that they’ve gone down the wrong development path.
“Obviously, you look already before, but I think Hungary was the last element in the puzzle,” Krack continued. “It is a track we expected to be a bit more competitive, and we were not. And that was the last data point to confirm that we have maybe not gone in the right direction.”
These unintended consequences on the development path are being addressed with new parts arriving within the next few races and are optimistic they’ll come up with solutions.
“We are very confident,” he said. “It took us now a couple of weeks to identify what the issues are, and also confirm them.
“You go to one event, you have issues, you go to another one, they are a little bit different, and then you don’t know. So, you have always to wait a little bit not to take a direction. You could just put parts on the car for the sake of putting parts on the car.
“This is not what we want to do.
“But we are quite confident that what we can do over the next races will give us the improvements.”
