AUGUST 19, 2023

Krack believes new package is a step forward

Aston Martin has dropped behind Mercedes and Ferrari in pure pace since the upgrades battle has heated up and there's no hiding that.

By Luis Vasconcelos
In the four Grand Prix held in July, Lawrence Stroll's team scored 42 points, while Ferrari collected 69 points and Mercedes clearly moved away from the Silverstone-based team by scoring 80 points. All of them, though, were beaten by McLaren, that has scored a whooping 86 points in four weekends, the Woking-based team being, however, too far behind that battle after a very poor start of the season to be a real threat to the other three teams: for now.
Aston Martin also introduced a couple of new aerodynamic packages since the start of the summer, and Team Principal Mike Krack insists the AMR23 has actually become a faster car, pointing out that, the data looks positive on what we have seen so far. Obviously with not so many dry laps before the race in Spa, for example, this is very provisional, so we need to dig deep and see where we have ended up, but on race day we looked a bit more competitive than recently.
With the Silverstone-based team bringing new parts almost every weekend, a lot of homework has to be done to understand what has worked and what has fallen bellow expectations, as Krack admitted: We have really done 24/7 analysis trying to understand and trying to do something about it. Obviously in the short time between Budapest and Belgium there's not so much you could do, but great credit that we managed to do something, everybody was really flat out and that allows us to look at this and try to improve the car for the next race.
With other teams hinting they're about to discontinue the development work on this years' car to put all their efforts on the 2024 chassis: that should, in general, carry for 2025 as the main effort will then be put into the completely new 2026-spec cars: the Aston Martin man made it clear that, we'll still be flat out on the development of this car for a while longer. He then explained that, if we want to play a role in the championship you have to be strong everywhere, you cannot say we just go for that track or that track, Zandvoort and Monza are very different, Singapore and Japan are also very different, so you need to perform well on all four of the next four and you need to have a package ready that allows you to go more on the low drag to high efficiency to high downforce. The car has to behave well everywhere, and this has to be the basics, then you will do your wings to adjust to the certain tracks.
But the Luxembourgish also warned that, you must avoid bringing upgrades for the sake of bringing upgrades, as that is easy and then you burn your cost cap money, so it is very important you understand what you're doing before you do. And I think it's also credit to a lot of good people we have and wait and invent more to understand rather than just throwing it in for the sake of it.