Aston Martin believes its recent dip in form has been compounded by going in the wrong direction with the development of its 2023 Formula 1 car.
The Silverstone-based outfit began the year as the second-fastest team behind Red Bull, scoring six podiums in the opening eight races.
But after finishing second at the Canadian Grand Prix, Aston has dropped down the pecking order with Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren leapfrogging them through recent upgrades.
Fernando Alonso suggested last weekend in Hungary that Pirelli’s change of tyre specification from Silverstone onwards was a potential factor in why Aston’s form had dropped.
But Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack says the team had found answers to its performance drop-off, revealing car upgrades and set-up choices had uncovered some “side effects” in the AMR23.
“The way we have developed the car, it’s very complex,” Krack said, as quoted by Motorsport.com. “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 up: do you use, for example, a part that 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.”
Krack said Aston felt that it had perhaps gone the wrong way in car development, but that its struggles in the Hungarian Grand Prix, where it expected to be competitive, only confirmed those initial suspicions.
“Obviously, you look already before, but I think Hungary was the last element in the puzzle,” he said. “It is a track where we expected to be a bit more competitive, and we were not. And that was the last data point to confirm that we have maybe not gone in the right direction.”
Krack confirmed the team is now working hard to bring new updates in the coming races that will be designed with the intention of addressing its current issues.
“We are very confident,” Krack said. “It took us now a couple of weeks to identify what the issues are, and also confirm them.
“You go to one event, you have issues, you go to another one, they are a little bit different, and then you don’t know. So, you have always to wait a little bit not to take a direction. You could just put parts on the car for the sake of putting parts on the car. This is not what we want to do.
“But we are quite confident that what we can do over the next races will give us the improvements.”
