Aston Martin team boss Mike Krack already saw at the beginning of 2023 that his team would face difficult times. The British racing team had a real dream start, thanks to Fernando Alonso’s multiple podium finishes, but was then no longer able to keep up with the competition due to the less good upgrades. However, Krack does not blame the major changes within Aston Martin for this.
‘At the beginning of the year, when we had these good results, I always raised my hand and said: Tougher times are coming. And unfortunately they came much faster than we wanted,” Krack tells Motorsport.com honestly. It was rumored that this dip in form for the British team may have been due to the move to a new campus. However, Krack doesn’t want to know anything about that. ‘I’m not someone who makes excuses. We knew in advance that we would be moving. 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: ‘We were surprised’
Aston Martin provided one surprise after another at the start of the 2023 season, thanks to Alonso’s performance with the AMR23. The Aston Martin team boss now says that the team itself was also surprised that it could compete with the top of the field. ‘When we started the season we were confident that we had taken a good step forward. And we were surprised that others were struggling.”
“But then the competition started to improve and we were not successful,” Krack continues about the dip in form the British team found itself in mid-2023. “We had our upgrades too, but we never made as big of a leap in our upgrades as our competition did. This caused others to slip through the cracks. So the gap to the fastest car (Red Bull, ed.), which we use as a benchmark, has not changed much over the course of the season. But now there are three or four different teams, while in the beginning there was none (between Aston Martin and Red Bull, ed.).”
Krack is already looking ahead
The British team boss hopes to turn the tide for Aston Martin in 2024, but thinks it will probably take a few more years before the current changes will bear fruit. “We honestly have to zoom out a little bit, over a period of three or four years instead of race by race or season by season,” Krack said. “If we don’t finish higher next year than this year, people will see that as a failure. I think you have to differentiate it a little more, but the only thing that matters is position, in the championship.’
