Aston facing ‘big challenge’ in Austin due to sprint format

Aston Martin has chosen to introduce in Austin new updates on its car, but gaining a good understanding of the revisions will be challenging given the weekend’s Sprint format.

Team Silverstone has been trying to regain the remarkable momentum it enjoyed in the first part of the season, when Fernando Alonso was a regular contender for the podium.

Aston’s performance progressively waned over the summer, although Alonso managed to claim a second-place finish at the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August.

But since, the team’s best result was a P6 picked up by the Spaniard last time out in Qatar.

Ideally, Fallows would have preferred to add updates to Aston’s AMR23 at a normal race weekend as the compressed schedule at The Circuit of the Americas – with just a single practice session to set-up the car – leaves the team with a complicated task ahead of it.

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“We have some updates coming into the weekend, and we're quite interested to see how they work,” said Fallows in Aston’s US Grand Prix preview.

“In some ways its a shame that it's a Sprint weekend because we’d like to have more time to dial in those updates and see how the cars will perform.

“It will be a big challenge to gain that understanding as early as possible. We're looking forward to seeing how these upgrades perform and, hopefully, it's a track where we should be reasonably competitive if we can get everything right.”

Fallows admitted that he has been disappointed with Aston’s recent performance level, but insists the shortfall has yielded its fair share of valuable lessons for the future.

"We did have a very good start to the season, and we've obviously been disappointed with the way it's panned out in recent races, but this experience has enabled us to learn some valuable lessons which we're trying to take into next year – we can see where we went wrong in terms of upsetting the car balance,” he said.

“We've understood why that's hurt our overall performance. Now, it's a question of making sure that we don't make the same mistakes again; it’s certainly been a year of learning."

Austin is the first leg of a grueling triple-header for F1, with teams looking to make the most of each round of racing while sustaining their efforts towards next year’s cars.

“This is quite a critical time of the year for us to get the most out of this year's car but also further our understanding for next year's development, which is why we're still producing updates this late into the season,” he explained.

“Mexico is a real challenge with its high altitude, and Brazil can be a chaotic race – especially with the changeable weather – so we have to make the most out of every session ahead of us.”

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