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Led by Fernando Alonso, the team was a force at the beginning of the Formula 1 season before falling behind.
By Ian Parkes
A year ago, Aston Martin team owner Lawrence Stroll was far from realizing his aspirations.
Twelve months later, Fernando Alonso highlighted the gap between last year’s team and this year’s.
“It’s been a historic season for Aston Martin and me, 8 podiums, more than two hundred points, almost three hundred for the team,” said Alonso, a two-time winner of the Formula 1 drivers’ championship. “Twelve months ago, this was unthinkable.
“For me, 2012 and this season are the best in my career,” he said, referring to his third season with Ferrari, when he missed out on a third title by 4 points. This year resulted in “a position I couldn’t have imagined at the beginning of the year with the car performance we had,” he said.
In 2021, Stroll expressed his goal for the team to win the world title in “four, five, six years. “In 2022, Aston Martin finished seventh out of 10 groups in the constructors’ championship. This year, it ranked fifth.
Aston Martin’s rise may seem trivial, however, Alonso’s three-time runner-up tally is higher than the team’s over the past six years combined.
Six of Alonso’s podiums came in the first eight races of the season. At the time, he and Aston Martin were Max Verstappen and Red Bull.
“We’ve made a lot of progress towards the end of 2022 with some of the ones we did later in the season,” Aston Martin technical director Dan Fallows said in an interview, referring to the car’s new parts.
He added: “Over the winter we had the opportunity to take more important steps in the same direction. We had momentum early on and continued that momentum, but in a more comprehensive and competitive way than we had controlled during the season.
As the season continued, momentum faded, and the chasing pack of Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren eventually passed Aston Martin.
“It was a surprise to see that we were so competitive from the start,” Fallows said. “But we knew that Ferrari and Mercedes, very strong groups with solidity in depth and a lot of experience, would be incredibly competitive and would fight back.
He continued: “It was very gratifying to be as competitive as we were, but we were under no illusion that we were a team likely to be operating at second place in the championship. We knew it was going to be a struggle to stay there for a length of time.”
Mercedes passed Aston Martin after the year’s seventh grand prix, in Spain, Ferrari passed it after the 14th race, in Italy.
McLaren, which contested the ninth race of the season in Austria 137 times more than Aston Martin, finished 22 times ahead.
The reason for Aston Martin’s slide was “a very aggressive development philosophy in-season,” Fallows said. “We decided to try to be quite brave, quite risky, in some instances, in terms of the speed of delivery of these parts.”
In retrospect, Fallows said, the team most likely didn’t make some of the decisions they did, but they valued the learning experience.
“Towards the end of the season, we used some races necessarily as glorified test sessions in many ways,” he said, adding: “We felt it was necessary to understand the car and understand what we need to do for next year.
Aston Martin finished 129 times in front of Mercedes, which at the time was a dominant Red Bull. Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack said there was no explanation for anyone at the team to be disappointed.
“We were surprised, and I think everybody was surprised, that some teams did not come out of the starting blocks as was expected,” Krack said, referring to Mercedes and Ferrari, which finished 3 points behind Mercedes.
He added: “As they expanded, they returned to their, shall we say, more natural position, anything that we can’t influence with the firepower that we had, and anything that we know we have to work on in the long term if we need a solution. “Leader more powerful team.
There were disruptions along the way when Aston Martin moved into a new $250 million factory in May. This was the first phase of a three-part task that includes the team’s structure of its own wind tunnel and a simulator, which will be developed live in the third quarter of 2024. The team has been at the Mercedes facility lately.
“We’ve moved to a new tech campus, a third of which is full,” Fallows said. “We’ve had a lot of upheavals over the course of the year in addition to this one.
“But we don’t have the level of facilities, the stability of structure, that some of our main competitors enjoy, and yet we’ve still been able to compete at that level.”
Stroll’s was decisive. In August 2018, he and a consortium of his “closest and dearest friends and business partners” bought the team, then known as Force India.
Last month, Stroll sold a minority stake in the team to Arctos Partners, a Dallas-based equity firm.
Stroll said the sale to Arctos is not a harbinger of his departure from the Aston Martin team or the automaker, in which he owns a 26. 23% stake.
“You don’t go spending hundreds of millions of pounds, building the greatest new Formula 1 campus and hiring 400 of the greatest employees if you’re about to leave the business,” Stroll said.
He added: “It couldn’t be apart from the fact that I have an interest in never being the majority shareholder of this team for a long time, and the same goes for the road car manufacturer. I’m not going anywhere. I intend to lead those corporations for many years to come. I’m at the beginning of the adventure in both.
Lawrence’s son, Lance Stroll, finished tenth in the drivers’ championship with problems and no podiums.
He broke both wrists in a preseason bicycle accident, forcing him out of the preseason test in Bahrain. But he returned to finish sixth in the race there. He took fourth, his highest finish of the year, two races later in Australia at a time when the car was at its most competitive.
Constrained by bad luck, adding retirements in Saudi Arabia and Japan, and some mistakes, such as his crash in qualifying in Singapore that forced him to retire from the race, Stroll finished 132 points behind Alonso.
“It was a good start to the season, a difficult midfield and then a strong comeback at the end,” said Lance Stroll. “There are things I can do for next year. Overall, it was an emotional season.
Tom McCullough, Aston Martin’s chief functional officer, said Stroll deserved to be praised for going through a difficult time.
“Lance, in terms of how he works, goes in and out of the factory between events,” McCullough said. “He’s running a simulator, he’s sitting with his engineers. “
He added: “He works very hard and is very motivated to receive feedback from one of the most productive drivers this game has ever seen. And that’s what Fernando is.
Fallows said that for next season the team would take a look at the car and think everything again.
“With what we did at the start of the season we saw that there were still opportunities to make a big step forward,” he said. “But it’s a relative game. It all depends on what everyone else is doing. “
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