Aston Martin says Sebastian Vettel is responsible for “small changes” in the team that inspired its turnaround into a regular Formula 1 podium scorer at the start of 2023.
Vettel arrived at Aston Martin in 2021 after being ousted from Ferrari but opted to retire at the end of his second season amid the team’s failure to build on a promising 2020.
Having won a race and claimed fourth in the last year under its previous guise, Aston Martin recorded successive seventh-place finishes in the Constructors’ Championship.
However, Fernando Alonso, who replaced Vettel, capitalised on the Silverstone squad’s resurgence to open the campaign with six podium finishes in the opening eight races.
Although Alonso only achieved that feat twice more in the remaining 14 rounds, Aston Martin accumulated 225 more points than in 2022 to rise to fifth in the standings.
After Team Principal Mike Krack credited his involvement earlier in the year, Aston Martin Performance Director Tom McCullough has expanded further on Vettel’s overall impact.
“When he joined us, he’d come from two championship-winning teams. At that time he brought a lot of small details,” McCullough explained.
“He is a relentless worker as well. We often say the driver’s the best sensor in the car, and a lot of the development, you’ve got a wind tunnel, you’ve got simulators, offline simulations, CFD.
“A driver whose backside’s connected to the car well can say ‘this is the phase of these kind of corners that I know we’re struggling maybe more than others’. And then that allows you to go dig into the data.”
McCullough admits there is an element of regret that the British marque failed to provide Vettel with a competitive enough car during his two campaigns with the team.
“For sure, we didn’t give him a good enough car over the two years he was here,” McCullough conceded. “By the end of his second year, we were making progress.
“I felt for him that he’s not really got any of the benefit of this year’s car. Over the years that often happens. I’ve been involved with that process myself in the past.”
The British engineer was alluding to a similar situation when he was based at Williams prior to arriving at Force India, now Aston Martin, in 2012 with Rubens Barrichello.
Williams achieved its latest win to date at the 2012 Spanish GP, but the experienced Brazilian missed out after receiving the axe at the conclusion of the previous season.
“At Williams, when we had Rubens Barrichello driving for us, he put so much work in during the 2010 and ’11 seasons, as far as to say ‘this is what you need to do, this what you should be doing’ on so many areas of the car,” he elucidated.
“The 2012 car, which unfortunately he didn’t end up driving, was the result of a lot of the hard work he’d done. So that is very much the case.”
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