F1 News
Aston Martin wants in on development battle: 'He says it can be done'
- GPblog.com
At Aston Martin, they cannot believe their luck after the Bahrain Grand Prix. After the race, Mike Krack was positive about the result and is confident that the team can achieve even more in the coming period.
Achieving a podium on your own merits. It has seemed almost impossible for middle motos in recent years. With a solid top three of Red Bull Racing, Ferrari and Mercedes, for the other teams it was scraping points and hoping for dropouts from the top teams. Aston Martin managing to score an immediate podium in the first race of 2023 is therefore a great success.
Stroll's wish
Although Charles Leclerc crashed out from P3, it is fair to say that Fernando Alonso showed the pace of a podium contender all weekend. Unreal for Alonso, but also for the team. Yet owner Lawrence Stroll is not content with this. "Lawrence always wants more. And this is also good like that," Krack told GPblog and others after the GP.
The start of the season is promising, but the question is whether Aston Martin can also keep up in the development battle of the top teams? Krack thinks so. "Well you know Dan (Fallows, Aston Martin's technical director) is very good and if Dan says that I trust him. So yeah we have a plan in place. But the others have a plan in place as well. So it could well be that if you develop at the same rate you stay where you are. So let's see where we get to."
Aston Martin on its own two feet?
That Aston Martin managed to be faster than Mercedes is extraordinary. This is because the Silverstone-based team buys Mercedes' engine, gearbox and rear suspension. Mercedes can match all that, Aston Martin has to buy it and match the rest of the car to it. The team seems to have done that better than the factory team.
With factory expansions and a new wind tunnel, more may be on the way for Aston Martin. In the future, the team could also design these kinds of parts itself to take an even bigger step forward. However, Krack does not want to think about that at the moment.
''That's a very strategic question that we will have to answer. We are quite happy with what we are getting on all fronts. We have not once had any kind of suspicion that anything was not 100%. So honestly we are very happy with what we are getting (from Mercedes).''