The ultimate deciding factor that will determine Aston Martin’s success

How do you rate a season like Aston Martin’s? On the face of it, a rise from P7 to P5 is progress but with context, 2023 was a year that promised so much more.

Aston Martin’s rise from infrequent point getters to podium placers over the course of a winter was nothing short of remarkable. In the era of budget caps, such a leap forward is no easy feat and perhaps surpassed only by McLaren’s similar reversal of fortunes.

It seemed as if something had clicked at the Silverstone-based team. In Fernando Alonso, they had an elite driver still hungry for success. Mike Krack led an experienced outfit that poached some of their rival’s finest staff and for perhaps the first time since the ‘pink Mercedes’ days of Racing Point, they had a car that was quick.

Red Bull’s domination began from race one but back in Bahrain there looked to be only one team capable of challenging them and that was Aston Martin. Alonso would finish on the podium in the season opener, as he would do for the first three races.

Aston Martin sat P2 in the standings, a remarkable jump from where they had been the previous year, but it was the Spanish Grand Prix that first hinted at trouble within the team. Alonso qualified eighth, his lowest of the season up until that point, and only made one place up during the grand prix.

At the same time, Aston Martin’s rivals for P2 had begun to make ground. The Mercedes upgrade package first unveiled in Monaco but maximised in Barcelona saw them shake off their poor early season form. McLaren were two races away from unveiling an upgrade of their own.

但在阿斯顿的竞争对手在进步s, the Silverstone team were going backwards. With a new factory being unveiled shortly before the British Grand Prix, Aston found that what they were putting on the car was making it slower and more difficult to understand.

Krack, speaking ahead of the race in Spa, admitted the team had made wrong development choices and were now paying the price.

“It’s very complex,” he explained. “You change one thing but you never change one thing and everything else is fine.

“You always have side effects when you do changes and you need to weigh what you use.

“For example, a part makes more downforce but has a different character or vice versa and we think that in one or two situations we have done not the right choice.”

Three months later and the mood within the Aston camp could not be more different than those heady days earlier in the year. An unfounded rumour that Alonso was considering retirement had no shred of truth in it but even the existence of such speculation was an indicator of just how far they had fallen.

Which leads us back to the question, how do you rate Aston’s season? The answer to that is tricky for while they have improved since 2022, scoring more podiums this year than every other season under Lawrence Stroll’s ownership combined, 2023 offered so much more.

Their slip down the order has felt inevitable. Mercedes were the first to pass, Ferrari shortly after and McLaren’s move ahead was the final nail in the coffin of their season. With a 135-point gap to Alpine, Aston will hold onto their P5 spot but the question of whether their year can be considered a success will be determined by what they learn between now and the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi.

It is no secret that post the summer break, teams who are not in championship contention tend to start looking to the future. The dominance of Red Bull in 2023 has made this an easier choice than previous years and while positions, and the significant prize money that comes with them, are still up for grabs, the last few races of the year can be considered more fact-finding missions.

For Aston, it is clear what mystery they need to solve – where did we go wrong and how do we not repeat the same mistake?

Unpacking their development issues reveals a simulation error within the Aston setup that caused their findings on track to not correlate to what they were seeing back at base. This is a not uncommon problem for F1 teams and indeed one that Mercedes suffered with, too.

But it was in the team’s desire to increase downforce that led to their issues. A front wing installed in Barcelona along with changes to the floor in Canada did achieve that effect but at the same time, disrupted the car’s balance.

This had the unintended consequence of making it harder for the Aston Martin mechanics and engineers to find the right set-up for the car and while at the start of the season it was able to be competitive from the off, now it takes more time to find the sweet spot. Coupled with the increased sprint races towards the end of the season and the limited practice sessions, Aston are now very much up against the clock during a race weekend.

“We can see where we went wrong in terms of upsetting the car balance,” technical director Dan Fallows said ahead of the race in Austin.

“We’ve understood why that’s hurt our overall performance. Now, it’s a question of making sure that we don’t make the same mistakes again: it’s certainly been a year of learning.

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“We were led in a certain direction by our simulation tools on the aerodynamic side, and we did follow a path that was just the wrong one. I think we have now corrected the issue with the new package.”

The discovery of this issue, whilst annoying no doubt, would also have come as a relief to the Aston technical team for it allows them to better understand just why whatever they put on the car made it slower and not quicker.

Aston’s downfall should also be taken in the context of who they are up against. While their HQ dates back to the Jordan team of the 1990s, this current iteration is a far newer project.

In comparison, Ferrari and McLaren have decades of experience between them, Red Bull joined the grid in 2006 and Mercedes returned after a 1950s foray in the early 2010s. Aston Martin’s shiny new HQ is an effort to move closer to the sport’s big teams but that is not a situation that will occur overnight. The reality is, the top four teams have been doing this far longer and so their processes are unsurprisingly much more streamlined and much more effective.

So, Aston find themselves in a state of flux.

Had you offered them a P5 before the start of the season they would have snapped your hand off but with the memory of what could have been, there is a rather more negative feel around the team.

但真正的判断阿斯顿的2023不应该come post-season but instead in the early stages of 2024. Provided they can get back to where they once were, Aston Martin now have a road map of what to do and what not to do to remain one of the sport’s very best.

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