Aston Martin got off to an excellent start last season, but the results completely changed in the middle of the season. As a constructor, Aston Martin finished fifth behind McLaren. A major setback for team boss Mike Krack. But he does not want to blame this setback on the fact that Aston Martin made the switch to a new factory in the course of last year.
Under the leadership of Lawrence Stroll, Aston Martin had enough reasons in 2018 to have a completely special F1 factory built in Silverstone. The team from the United Kingdom was immediately in good financial shape. Last year they were finally able to take a seat in the new factory, while Aston Martin was making the best start to a Formula 1 season ever with Fernando Alonso as the main player.
Development lagged behind
But the development of the AMR23 lagged behind compared to the competition. At the end of the season, the gap to Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren had grown considerably. Something Krack already took into account. “I’ve always said that tougher times were coming, but unfortunately they came faster than we wanted,” the Luxembourgian told Motorsport.com last year.
“I’m not someone who makes excuses,” said Krack, who does not want to blame the disappointing results on the interim move. ‘We knew in advance that we would move. We knew in advance that we were expanding. We knew in advance that we were still growing. So if you know that in advance, you can plan all these things and not use it as an excuse. That’s too easy.’
Krack was confident
At the start of the season, Krack was still full of confidence. ‘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 couldn’t do that. We had updates too, but we never made as big strides as our competition did. As a result, others slipped through the cracks.’
“The gap to the fastest car, the target we use, has not changed much over the course of the season,” Krack acknowledges. ‘But now there are three or four different teams, while in the beginning there were none. So it’s basically: what has the competition done and what haven’t we done enough? But it doesn’t matter that we have too much on our plate,” he concludes.
