Aston Martin has been the real revelation of this Formula 1 season, with two-time world champion Fernando Alonso taking three podium finishes in the first three races and securing the team the second place in the Constructors’ championship, right behind Red Bull.
After last season failure, when the English team finished as the seventh force in the championship, the team has worked very well on the car and these efforts are showing on the track. The Spanish driver said he was very satisfied with this progress and, after the Australian GP, he said:
“I think Mercedes, they’ve also been strong in Jeddah, to be honest. I was within one tenth of George [Russell], fighting to get this extra five seconds or whatever at the end, so it was very, very close.
“It seems that qualifying is quite important now, because race pace is very similar, and I think now we enter into a part of the season that is going to be very interesting – which team is developing the car faster?” Alonso said.
“I think the first three races being away from Europe, it’s difficult to bring upgrades and things like that. But from now on, maybe we see the level of the teams changing a little bit, race-by-race, depending on who brings an upgrade that is good enough.
“For us, it’s all happy days at the moment. We never expected to be on the podium, maybe even throughout the season, and in three races we have three.”
“So, everything that comes now is a plus… third and fourth is a lot of points. We take every opportunity, and we need to learn, and we need to grow as a team maybe off-track because we are racing against Red Bull, Mercedes, Ferrari.
“Teams that are used to this kind of pace of development and things like that. Maybe we are just in a learning process, so we take this 2023 in a very humble manner and let’s see how it’s going.”
Also Aston Martin Team Principal, Mike Krack, gave his opinion on the AMR23, with the foresight of being careful with his words:
“I think we need to still be careful with making such predictions,” he stated.
“The competitors are very, very close, except one which is quite far away. But we need to keep our heads down and we need to give 100% at all times to be able to maintain this position and as long as we can,” Krack concluded.
