Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack insists his team isn’t “lost”, despite the perception that its recent results have produced.
Aston hasn’t succeeded so far in its efforts to recover the momentum it enjoyed in the first half of the season, when a string of podiums by Fernando Alonso positioned Team Silverstone as the second fastest outfit on the grid.
Its gradual downturn has continued in the back half of its 2023 campaign, with Alonso’s sixth-place finish in Qatar its best result in the last six races.
The team’s successive pit lane starts in Austin with both drivers and in Mexico with Stroll coupled with Alonso’s retirement at the Circuit of the Americas and a double DNF in Mexico make for a gloomy picture.
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Krack understands where the prception is coming from but denies that Aston is a team that has lost its way.
"I get this impression, and I was expecting the question also," Krack told the media in Mexico.
"But I think when you are lost, you are rolling the dice, you try things that are not reasonable and this is not the case.
"We have very focused engineering discussions, weighing options against each other and while we don't want to go racing from the pit-lane, it is very important that we understand the findings that we have in the team and then take pragmatic decisions.
"It is not easy, but it is the right way to move forward.”
Aston’s deputy technical director Eric Blandin recently revealed that the development of its AMR23 contender had been side-tracked in the second part of the season by erroneous data produced by its simulation tools.
This problem has since been addressed but Krack argues that the complexity of F1’s current generation of cars often entails a trial and error approach to development.
"The cars are complex and you try to improve them all the time, and then when you bring upgrades - we know the issues we had in Austin - I don't think we then have to go through them again.
"In the Austin race, we were quite happy with how it went, but then you come to Mexico, and you are not where you think you should be and the car does not do what you expect it to.
"It is something we need to work out because there are other tracks with low speed [corners] and different characteristics, so it is important to understand what you are doing.
"The best solution to understand is to revert to something, comparing to something that you know, and that from an engineering point of view, is the best approach."
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