Aston Martin's remarkable results this season have opened up the team's prospects, but technical director Dan Fallows remains realistic when it comes to weighing Team Silverstone's chances of winning on merit this year.
Aston currently leads the charge in F1's Constructors' standings behind Red Bull.
All signs point to the bulls running away with the championship, but Fernando Alonso's string of podium finishes, and a healthy haul of points scored by teammate Lance Stroll have positioned Aston as the second-best team on the grid, ahead of Mercedes and Ferrari.
In Miami, Alonso singled out three venues – Monaco, Budapest and Singapore – where the Spaniard believes Aston could pull off an upset.
Aston team boss Mike Krack, technical director Dan Fallwos and perdormance director Tim McCullough mark a pause at the Miami GP.
But Fallows says Aston isn't thinking about its chances of success for now, as the team is focused on extracting the most from its AMR23.
"I'd love to say that a win is possible this season," Fallows said back in Miami.
"There are obviously some circuits where it's not the normal run of play necessarily, sometimes cars have particular characteristics that can play out. For example in Monaco, tracks like that.
"But honestly, I think we're realistic about our situation, where we are at the moment, our focus is really on just maximising the amount of performance we get on the car in the shortest possible time. And we'll see what kind of rewards that brings."
Nevertheless, the former Red Bull engineer says that he's keeping his former team in his line of sight as a strong reference for Aston.
"We do need to sort of consider where we are relative to the Red Bull," he said. "But I think there are areas we believe where we're relatively strong.
"Also, we have to optimise our car for every particular circuit, which means that sometimes there may be aspects of whether it's low-speed, high-speed corners, which aren't quite as strong as some other competitors.
"The Red Bull as a concept has been evolved for a bit longer than ours. We obviously very publicly went to a different concept early last year. We are still developing that.
"We think we've made a very big step this year, but we still have a little way to go. And I think honestly, I wouldn't point to sort of one single area of it. I think we just need to improve everything, really."
A well-balanced, homogeneous package with a degree of imbedded versatility appears to be the main asset of Aston's 2023 car.
"It's not necessarily that I think our car has particular strengths in some areas," added Fallows.
"I think we have managed to generate a car which is reasonably capable in a lot of different areas. We can tune it to what we believe is the optimum for that particular track.
"There are certainly areas that we are focused from an aerodynamic and mechanical point of view that we think we can make progress.
"But honestly, I don't look at it as a car that has any significant weaknesses at the moment.
"It's just that we want to kind of build on the speed that we have and keep going with the same philosophy."
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