Aston Martin upgrades fail to correlate with simulator

Jaden Diaz
05/06/2024

The development race in F1 is heating up. Unfortunately for Aston Martin, they are once again being left behind. The situation at the Silverstone-based team is worsening, and owner Lawrence Stroll is prepared to make changes. However, the AMR24’s poor performance could be due to a lingering hindrance.

At the beginning of the season, there was optimism at Aston Martin. Fernando Alonso was only a few tenths away from Pole Position in Bahrain, and his qualifying efforts were similarly impressive in Jeddah, Japan and especially China.

Although race pace became a surprising limitation for the AMR24, there were at least signs of potential. Alonso would usually compete with at least one Mercedes or McLaren – keeping Mike Krack’s team more or less around the front-runners.

Aston Martin goes backwards despite upgrades

Unfortunately for the British team, they have regressed in recent events. Not only is their race pace severely lacking, but their qualifying speed has worsened since the upgrades introduced in Imola.

The update package brought to Emilia Romagna was a continuation of the updates that arrived in Japan. In short, the Imola GP was the first race where all the big teams (McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull) had their first full set of updates.

Once again, Aston Martin did not improve with the introduction of upgrades. Both in relative and absolute terms, the AMR24 lost out to the front-runners. At the next event in Monaco, while Alonso was compromised by traffic, the car’s lack of pace was clear.

Because of this, Lawrence Stroll has made an offer to Enrico Cardile – Ferrari’s technical director. The Canadian demands a reversal of the worrying trend developing at the Silveerstone-based operation. Team principal Mike Krack and Technical Director Dan Fallows are under growing pressure.

Aston Martin, Dan Fallows

However, as Alpine has shown, making changes when results don’t go as expected is not always the right approach. This is especially true since Aston Martin was again deceived by the numbers shown in the wind tunnel.

The upgrades introduced in Imola were supposed to generate significant performance. This obviously was not the case, as the factory data did not correlate on track.

It is plausible that the team’s development is being limited by the Mercedes wind tunnel. If this is the case, waiting until Aston’s new simulator comes online in 2025 seems like a prudent approach. Twelve months of disappointing progress does not directly equate to a personnel failure.

Still, Lawrence Stroll is clearly unhappy with the situation. The coming weeks and months will reveal the nature of his response.

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