What Aston Martin’s curfew burn told us about its F1 upgrade trajectory

Although there is no downside to using them up if needed, teams also know that if they are not in their back pocket for the end of the season, then that carries big risks.

If the points battle is tight, the last thing a team would want would be some unexpected late-night work triggering a final-race grid penalty that could derail all the year’s efforts up until that point.

It is why it is often only in extreme emergencies – like Williams switching cars over in Australia following Alex Albon’s Friday crash – that teams use them up early in the campaign.

So it was interesting that at the recent Japanese Grand Prix, Aston Martin elected to also burn through one of its jokers, considering there had been no unexpected drama on the track.

Instead, it was done to ensure that the team did not have to rush the switching over of Fernando Alonso’s car to its latest upgrade package for qualifying day.

As performance director Tom McCullough explained about the early use of a joker: “We never want to do that. But when we looked at the amount of work to do, it was becoming clear that to do a good job with the fit and finish of the cars – and there were some bits that needed bonding to the chassis and stuff like that – it wasn’t going to be possible to get it all done.”

Team principal Mike Krack added: “You have to take everything off, and then you have to put it on. And then, actually, the long time that all this stuff needs is the quality check.

“So, is everything in the right place? Do all the parts fit 100% the way they should?

“If you do not have the quality, and if you go into the next day and one car is one way, and the other car measures something different, it’s the worst case.

“The quality checking and the quality control is actually insane sometimes: how much you have to check and double-check and recheck again.”

But there was a bigger factor at play behind Aston Martin’s call in not sacrificing quality  – and that was in ensuring its upgrade path for this year has a different outcome to last season.

The story of the team’s 2023 campaign was of a car that was super competitive at the start of the season, especially when rivals like Ferrari and McLaren were on the back foot, but then lost its way when upgrades produced effects which were labelled as…