Fernando Alonso highlighted the “biggest positive” to Aston Martin’s performance slump in the 2024 Formula 1 season: the lessons that can be applied to 2025.
Aston Martin embarked on last year as the fifth fastest team, but hot on the heels of the top four.
In qualifying trim especially, Alonso was able to extract strong performances, highlighted by fifth and third in qualifying for the Japanese and Chinese Grands Prix respectively.
But as the year wore on, Aston Martin was plagued by development issues, falling into the clutches of the lower field teams.
The net result was a return of 94 points in the Constructors’ standings, 186 less than in 2023 and Alonso featured in the top-10 just five times across the final 10 rounds of the season.
“[The season] goes up and down for everybody,” Alonso rued in the penultimate round of the campaign at Qatar.
“Difficult to be sure of that, but I think we didn’t manage to improve the car much throughout the season.
“So we started quite strong, but we are now in a position that we’re struggling to be in Q3 on some occasions.”
Despite Aston Martin’s struggles, Alonso acknowledged that through that difficulty there’s an opportunity to apply the lessons learned to the AMR25.
“All those difficulties, I think, probably are teaching us a lot of lessons, which we will apply into next year’s car,” he said.
“And that will be probably the biggest positive aspect of the second part of the year, you know, that even if we didn’t succeed in putting much performance on the car, I think it’s well understood what we are struggling with at the moment. So that will be applying in 2025.”
Aston Martin has a ‘clear understanding’ going into 2025
Alonso pinpointed the Azerbaijan and Singapore GPs as the highlights from the latter half of 2024.
The Spaniard finished sixth and eight at the Baku and Marina Bay circuits respectively and attributed that to storing qualifying performances (eighth and seventh).
“I think Baku and Singapore were just good Sundays, thanks to a good qualifyings on Saturday, street circuits, we maximised, I think, the opportunities there,” he said.
“And some of our rivals, you know, maybe didn’t perform to perfection there.”
Despite those highlights, Alonso opined that “after the summer break, we’ve been struggling a little bit, but the team is still working flat out to bring upgrades”.
Many of the upgrades didn’t succeed in elevating Aston Martin’s performance but Alonso concluded by saying: I think there is a clear understanding now of where the path is into next year’s car. So yeah, that’s the aim.”
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