That was the view of rivals and pundits who crunched the numbers after the three days of running at Sakhir.
The car looked good from the start, but it was a race distance undertaken by Fernando Alonso late on the final day that caught the eye, the Spaniard running a medium/hard/medium tyre combination that saw him get faster and faster.
It was a strong conclusion to a test that began badly when the AMR23 stopped on track and triggered a red flag right at the start of Thursday’s opening session due to a typical test day electrical niggle.
After that pretty much everything went to plan, at least in terms of the job list, which had the obvious focus of honing the AMR23 while also allowing Alonso to get to know the car and team better.
If there was a negative it was the absence of Lance Stroll, who as Alonso himself was keen to flag would have provided vital feedback on what’s changed from last year’s car.
The loss of that reference and the need to get reserve driver Felipe Drugovich up to speed on race preparations in case he has to be called upon for this weekend meant that it was not quite an optimum programme, but it wasn’t far off.
“We had our plans of what we wanted to do over the three days,”said team principal Mike Krack after the test ended. “We had a little bit of an issue giving the first red flag of the test, and everybody looks at each other, ‘Oh, this is not a good start.’
“I think we did a bit more than 350 laps over the three days, which is quite good. So from that point of view, we are quite happy that we managed to complete all what we wanted to complete.
“You always want to do much more than you can do in in three days. You have a huge list of requirements, of requests from all kinds of departments, and you have to prioritise them. The list does not become shorter. Each time you have done something, another topic comes up.
“So you can never say that you are finished. You are always having questions. But this is also the nice bit about F1, that you always have to explore other directions, new Ideas and stuff like that.”
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR23
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
Performance as always is the key parameter, and while Aston didn’t figure very high on headline times – Alonso was ninth overall with a lap set on Saturday with the C4 tyres – it was that final long run that was significant.
Despite the evidence on the timing screens, Krack urged a note of…
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