Aston Martin admit that their car is "tough to drive"
Aston Martin team boss Mike Krack has admitted that his team's 2024 F1 car, the AMR24 has been "quite tough to drive", indicating that the Silverstone-based outfit needs to make significant changes in the next weeks if it wants to close in on the field-leading four teams.
Aston Martin has had a tough season so far. The Silverstone-based outfit managed to start last year with a string of podium finishes courtesy of two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, but their pace faded as the season progressed.
This negative trend continued this year as the British team struggled to keep up with the field-leading trio of Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari at the start of the year. Although they occasionally matched Mercedes' pace in the opening rounds, the Anglo-German squad made a huge jump in recent races, which saw Aston Martin find itself in no man's land.
Speaking of the targets for this year, Aston Martin team boss Mike Krack said that his outfit needs to provide its drivers Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso with a more stable platform to work with: "And also lately, we see that as soon as we don't do that, they struggle more. And this is something that we have to work on.
"So I think we have to move the focus away from the drivers. In this case, they need to get the best of what we have. And at the moment, it's not good enough."
The Luxembourgish motorsports engineer said that the main limitation is the AMR24 is a very difficult car to drive which the team will try to sort out with upgrades in the coming races.
"Well, the car is quite tough to drive, and we have not managed to cure that so far. So what we need is a car more benign, easier to extract potential, give them more confidence.
"And we had something like that in the past, and that was much, much easier for the drivers. If you lack confidence in your car, then you cannot go to the maximum. You have to take margin and you are much more exposed to these small gaps that we are having these days.
"And then you can end up on the wrong side of it. And then you start a race much, much further back and there is no point. So it's up to us to fix these issues.
"You asked me how long. I would be happy if I could tell you in two races we have fixed everything. We're working hard on it to cure these problems and we're trying to bring these updates as quick as possible."
Krack has underlined the importance of the team’s recent move to their new, state-of-the-art F1 campus, but he still feels that Aston Martin needs to become a bigger team not just in terms of infrastructure, but also in the way it operates.
"We are on a journey to become a bigger team, a top team. We have quite a lot of infrastructure projects in the making. And I think the comment that he made is probably related to last year, we had quite a lot of good results, but we were not ready as a team.
"We were in a different position. We still had our old factory. Nothing had really changed. I think we have grown over the 12 months, and that is what he refers to. Unfortunately, the results are not as good as they were last year, but this is very often circumstantial.
"Other teams have made more progress than we have done in comparison. But overall, it seems that we are in a better place, how we go about things, how we discuss things, how we make changes. And I think this is what he feels compared to last year.
