There’s cautious optimism within the Aston Martin ranks with the belief the team is in “a much better place” ahead of the 2025 season with a “close to 100 per cent new” Formula 1 car.
After a strong start to the 2023 season, Aston Martin has been on a development slump over the last 18 months and despite finishing fifth in last year’s Constructors’ standings, found points harder and harder to come by as the year wore on.
Instead, the team was chasing its tail, experimenting with development in the hope of unlocking the secret to improve its bewildering lack of performance.
A leadership reshuffle has also commenced across the last few months, with former Technical Director Dan Fallows departing, Tom McCullough moving to a new role in the group and CEO Andy Cowell appointing himself as Team Principal.
Cowell joined Aston Martin in October and added his new role in a January reshuffle which has seen Mike Krack appointed as Chief Trackside Officer and new Chief Technical Officer Enrico Cardile handed Silverstone-based leadership responsibilities.
The Silverstone base in question is state of the art and Aston Martin is now operating a new wind tunnel and simulator that could be considered best in class.
Cowell, speaking to select media including Motorsport Week ahead of Tuesday’s F1 75 launch event at London’s O2 Arena, said the combination of last year’s learnings, new systems and a new approach to working have hopefully contributed to a better end product.
“I think we’ve got a reasonable understanding on last year’s car,” Cowell said.
“And what we’ve worked on through the winter is to try and create a car that is more stable through a corner, is more predictable to drive through the race.
“We feel that that will reward us well with regards to race performance, as well as several areas where we can see that there were improvements to make.
“So we’ve worked on that as well through the winter. The aerodynamic package of the car is close to 100 per cent new, a huge amount of effort put in at the campus by everyone.
“The aero release points were later than we’ve ever done before with a car and that’s thanks to the investment that’s been put into the campus and the capability of the operations team in particular, but also the design group.
“Both those groups have enabled the aero development team to spend several more weekends in the wind tunnel and I’m looking forward to seeing that on track, seeing the results, and seeing how the on-track results correlate with the measurements that are done on campus.”
Aston Martin ‘will catch up very soon’
Aston Martin’s mission has been clearly set out by team owner Lawrence Stroll and that is to win F1 championships.
The team is some way off from achieving that goal, but thanks to the factors Cowell mentioned, Fernando Alonso believes the lost ground of the last season and a half can be recovered soon.
“I think we did learn a lot last year,” the Spaniard said.
“The second part of the season was a lot of experiments going on in the way of learning even more things for the 2025 car.
“The simulator has been updated as well, so we’ve been working a lot in the sim as well to be able to develop the car a little bit more precisely than in the last few seasons.
“We have new tools, we have new organisation, we have new people in place to tackle some of the weaknesses that we for sure identified last year.
“I think we start in a much better place, and we still need to work a lot for sure.
“We lost a little bit of time and months last year, and we think we will catch up very soon.”
Alonso and Aston Martin don’t have to wait long to find out if the AMR25 has benefitted from the work the team has been putting in over the last few months.
The Silverstone-based squad will join the rest of the F1 fraternity for pre-season testing in Bahrain on February 26-28.
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