Aston Martin Formula 1 boss Mike Krack has denied that it would represent a “failure” if the team was unable to improve upon its previous championship position this season.
The Silverstone squad began last season as the surprise package as it emerged as Red Bull’s closest contender, with Fernando Alonso logging six podiums in eight races.
However, Aston Martin encountered unintended “side effects” with a series of upgrades that saw it become outdeveloped by Ferrari, Mercedes and also McLaren.
Although Alonso returned to the rostrum twice beyond the summer break and Aston Martin accumulated 225 more points than in 2022, it still dropped to fifth in the standings.
Krack admitted he had been braced for a decline in competitiveness during Aston Martin’s early-season highs, but he revealed that it came earlier than he had expected.
“At the beginning of the year, when we had these good results, I always had my finger up and said: ‘We will have more difficult times’. And they came, unfortunately, much quicker than we wanted them,” Krack told Autosport.
Aston Martin’s mid-season plight coincided with the transition into a new purpose-made facility that had been orchestrated through the wealth of team owner Lawrence Stroll.
However, Krack refuted the suggestion that the extensive upheaval away from the race track might have contributed to the British marque’s sudden downturn in results.
“I’m not the kind of guy that looks for excuses,” he declared. “We knew before that we would move. We knew before that we were expanding. We knew before that we were still growing. So if you know that before, you can plan all these things, and you should not use it as an excuse – it’s too easy.
“When we started the season, we were confident that we had made a good step forward. And we were surprised that others were struggling.
“But then, the competition started to improve, and we did not manage this improvement. We also had our upgrades, but we never made such big steps with our upgrades as our competition did. This resulted in others slipping in between.
“So the gap to the fastest car, which is the objective that we’re using, has not changed that much over the season. But now, there are three or four different teams in between, whereas in the beginning, there was none, you know?
“So it’s basically: what has the competition done, and what have we not done enough? But having too much on our plate doesn’t matter.”
Alonso, who clinched fourth in the Drivers’ Championship in his debut year with Aston Martin, commented in Abu Dhabi that the team “needs to improve” in the 2024 season.
But Krack has been more lowkey on Aston Martin’s prospects, insisting that the upcoming campaign will not be decisive to the squad achieving its long-term ambitions.
“We honestly have to zoom out a little bit, over a three- or four-year period rather than race by race or season by season,” he noted.
“If we do not finish in a higher position next year than we do this year, people will see it as a failure. I think you have to differentiate it a little bit more, but the nature of the business is championship position.”
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