F1 News
Aston Martin satisfied: "It leaves us well placed to come back here for the race"
- GPblog.com
Aston Martin F1 Team broke new ground last year as Racing Point and with the name change now in place, they are heading for a title. The team hopes to achieve this within three to five years, but for now, the focus is on the 2021 season. Despite some bumps here and there things are looking good, says the team boss on the website of Aston Martin.
Understanding the car
Aston Martin is driving the AMR21 this season and it was tested extensively during the winter test last weekend. The primary aim was to better understand the car and refine it for the coming season. With less test days this was of course a slightly more difficult task, but so far everything worked out well.
Especially Sebastian Vettel was a point of interest, because he is new to the team and has a different approach than Lance Stroll, who already knows everything. Team principal Otmar Szafnauer is satisfied about the winter test and learned a lot about the car they will use this year.
Settling into the team
"[It was] a pretty busy week where we learned a huge amount despite a few challenges here and there – including a sandstorm on Friday. Between them, Lance and Sebastian covered a total of 314 laps this week and we’ve now got a vast amount of data to digest before we come back here for the race.
"We lost a bit of track time with some technical issues over the weekend, especially for Sebastian yesterday [on Saturday], but that’s one of the reasons why we go testing. One of the main tasks this week was to continue helping Sebastian settle into the team and we’ve made a lot of progress already.
By the sounds of it, Vettel has not been able to complete his entire programme, where Stroll has. "Lance was able to conduct our programme as planned this morning [on Sunday], gaining some useful data on the long runs, race simulations and shorter runs too. It leaves us well placed to come back here for the race later this month."