Fernando Alonso expects Aston Martin to start F1 season in a better place

SILVERSTONE – Fernando Alonso expects Aston Martin to start the Formula One season in a much better place after learning some hard lessons in 2024.

The Silverstone-based team, who showed off their new Mercedes-powered AMR25 car online on Feb 23 before testing in Bahrain starts on Feb 26, finished fifth for the second year running in 2024.

Expectations had been high after two-time world champion Alonso took six podiums in the first eight races of 2023 but the Spaniard failed to finish higher than fifth in 2024, while teammate Lance Stroll’s best 2024 finish was sixth.

Dan Fallows, who was technical director, was replaced last November, with the team bringing in former Ferrari technical director Enrico Cardile and Red Bull’s title-winning designer Adrian Newey, who joins in March.

The season starts in Australia on March 16.

“I think we did learn a lot last year. The second part of the season was sort of experiments going on just in the way of learning even more things into the 2025 car,” Alonso told reporters.

“The simulator has been updated as well, so we’ve been working a lot in the sim 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. So I think we start in a much better place.

“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.”

Stroll agreed: “There was a lot of experimenting through the course of last year and I think we learnt a lot why some of the upgrades didn’t bring us what we wanted.

“Everything that has gone into the development of this year’s car has really taken a lot of the lessons we learnt from last year.”

Team principal Andy Cowell, who took over from Mike Krack in January, declined to set a time frame for success and said there would be no cutting corners.

He said work had been done to make the new car more stable through corners and more predictable to drive. Cowell also hoped for better correlation, matching the data from the wind tunnel to what the car was doing on track.

A new wind tunnel will be coming on stream soon at Silverstone, giving the team their own facility instead of having to use the Mercedes one.

Cowell hailed Newey’s arrival as “just brilliant”.

“He’s one of the few engineers that can bridge across aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics and the data logger that is the driver,” he added.

“He can communicate well with the driver and pull out the comments that the telemetry perhaps isn’t showing, and can bring that back into the factory on campus and help us chase the thing that will deliver the best lap-time improvement.

“I think we’ll feel the benefit of him in the opening days. I’m sure he’s frustrated with not working on a Formula One car at the moment, especially as there are new regulations out.

“And I’m sure he will be coming up with observations pertinent to the car concept, and also in terms of the tools, in terms of the fidelity of our tools and equipment, and his thoughts on where we should make improvements.”

The 66-year-old Briton, whose cars have won 25 drivers’ and constructors’ championships for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, has been on gardening leave with no input in the AMR25.

Meanwhile, Carlos Sainz was named a director of Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (GPDA), the trade union for F1 drivers. His appointment was announced on Feb 23.

The Spaniard replaces four-time champion Sebastian Vettel, who stepped down from the role in 2024. Sainz, 30, joined Williams after relinquishing his place at Ferrari to seven-time title-winner Lewis Hamilton.

Sainz joins GPDA chairman Alexander Wurz, Mercedes driver George Russell and legal adviser Anastasia Fowle on the board.
REUTERS