Aston Martin has dismissed claims that they are on a consistent decline, despite persistent enhancements to their 2023 model.
Aiming to recover from a mid-year dip, especially after Fernando Alonso’s consecutive early-season podiums, a substantial upgrade was introduced at Austin – a location where Aston Martin faced significant challenges.
“Aston seem to have made the car slower and slower with every upgrade,” remarked McLaren’s Lando Norris. “For us it’s been vice versa.”
Such was the extent of Aston Martin’s struggles in the pre-US GP events that both Alonso and Lance Stroll began the race from the pit lane. This was a result of violating parc ferme regulations by entirely revamping their car configurations.
Alonso conveyed to DAZN, “On Saturday we did the race with the new (upgraded) car and on Sunday Lance did it with the new one in a different configuration and I had the old one was a setup we know the best.”
“Now we will put everything on the table and draw the conclusions,” the Spanish racer added.
Early indications suggest that Aston Martin might have already pinpointed why there was such a dramatic drop in performance prior to the adjustments made on Sunday.
“It was a super race,” Alonso mentioned, even though he eventually had to bow out of the US GP due to damage to the floor.
“There was suddenly a lot more pace in the car. We could overtake the midfield with some ease and we were even getting closer to (George) Russell. So I think it was good news.”
He continued, “We wanted to leave Austin at least with some clear conclusion going into Mexico. The race was more of a FP0 (free practice 0) to get to FP1 in Mexico prepared.”
Mike Krack, the team chief, concurred with Alonso’s perspective, emphasizing that the Sunday side-by-side evaluations provided the technical team with adequate insights to determine that the recent upgrades weren’t detrimental.
“Right now we only have the laptimes and the results so we still have to analyse, but we don’t think the new update package is bad,” he expressed.
