Fernando Alonso has declared that Aston Martin is “not blind into the dark” regarding the balance problems that have hampered the team with its 2024 Formula 1 car.
Aston Martin had emerged as Red Bull’s closest challenger in the nascent stages last term, but slipped backwards to finish in fifth in the Constructors’ Championship.
Although it has maintained that position this season, the Silverstone-based squad has begun to come under pressure from both RB and Haas behind in recent races.
Aston Martin’s strive to cut the gap to the leading quartet encountered a blow at Imola as boss Mike Krack suggested that updates had made its car “difficult to drive”.
Alonso endured a nightmare weekend at the Italian venue as he crashed in FP3 and suffered a premature Q1 elimination, turning his race into a glorified test showing.
His team-mate Lance Stroll has disclosed there are increasing limitations on the AMR24 compared to its predecessor which has impacted its overall competitiveness.
The Canadian divulged that he had experienced “some entry oversteer, some corner understeer, these kind of things. Kerb riding, the usual things to keep working on.”
Stroll would proceed to add that getting on top of the 2024 car has been “more of a challenge”, citing “it’s a little bit of a trickier balance than the car we had last year”.
When asked whether he was providing the same assessments to the engineers, Alonso replied: “I think we both have similar feelings on the car and similar comments.
“There are a couple of set-up tools and directions that could improve that, something that we’ve been testing also in Imola for example on my car on Sunday.
“But yeah fundamentally I think we need to keep working on the balance of the car. We added downforce in all the upgrades that we brought to the track, but we still cannot use all that downforce in an efficient way in lap time because the balance maybe is not totally perfect in the corners.
“But I think we understand this. We have a couple of ideas that, you know, in the next development of the cars and upgrades, we’ll try to fix those kind of problems.
“So, yeah, I mean, we are not blind into the dark. You know, we are aware of the situation.
“But at the same time, it’s the nature of these cars as well that, you know, as you add downforce, they become a little more critical and more difficult to drive.
“Yeah, and this is something that we need to fix.”
Alonso has admitted that testing the developments on the simulator was not comparable to a real track experience as the former can disguise some potential hitches.
“The simulator is a little bit more, let’s say forgives you many of the things that the track doesn’t,” he elucidated.
“And when you put the numbers, the theoretical numbers on the simulator, you just get faster without too many problems, you know, on balances, something like that.
“So simulator is great tool for the engineers, for the drivers to learn tracks and things like that.
“But for the last detail of the set-up or the last behaviour on track, I think the simulator is still not as the real car, so yeah, we need to work on Friday, Saturday on that.”
Meanwhile, Stroll conceded that it provided a tough task with the current ground effect cars to strike a balance between an optimal balance and increasing downforce.
Questioned on whether adding performance through downforce gains was part of the solution to refine the balance, Stroll answered: “It’s both. I mean, that’s Formula One.
“That’s how the development works. You try and get the car as balanced as possible and add as much downforce as you can. So, same thing over here.”
