After its excellent, albeit surprising, start to the 2023 Formula 1 season, Aston Martin hadn’t been able to preserve that momentum through the rest of the year and into 2024.
Where Fernando Alonso scored 149 points in the opening 12 races of 2023, the veteran Spaniard has managed just 45 in the same number of races this term, without a podium finish among them.
Explaining Aston Martin’s apparent downturn from 2023 and fluctuations in form across 2024 does not boil down to a single issue in a tightly congested field, but largely comes as the result of other teams making greater improvements between seasons.
Aston Martin’s AMR23 was often the second- or third-quickest car at the start of last year, but the team failed to make the same amount of ground with its upgrades and ultimately settled in fifth in the constructors’ championship.
It appears to have consolidated that position for the most part, although it had come under greater scrutiny from an improving RB team when the European season first began.
This could be traced back to an Imola upgrade that Aston Martin brought to the table, including a new front wing, floor, and bodywork that it hoped would raise the performance level of the car overall.
Instead, it made the car more difficult to drive; Fernando Alonso’s practice crash and qualifying off at Imola rather suggested that the drivers were considerably more at odds with the car after the revisions. Naturally, this coincided with a slump in form; the team’s sole points-scoring exploits in the next four races came at Montreal, where it managed a double points finish.
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR24
Photo by: Erik Junius
“We’ve got some balance characteristics that made the car a little bit harder to set up and drive, but I think most people are battling those. It’s always a compromise,” said Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough.
“That said, we’re needing to add just base performance to the car to be competitive with the people we’re trying to race. “We fell a bit short [in Spain and Austria] and with the nature of those tracks. But we had the same spec car in Canada and had a much more competitive weekend. We sort of understand the reasons for that.”
It’s understood that the AMR24’s issues largely flare up in circuits with longer-radius or faster corners, hence its lack of performance at Barcelona and during the final two sectors at the Red Bull Ring. GPS traces suggest that Alonso struggled to…
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