Aston Martin team boss Mike Krack says his outfit faced from the outset last season a “particular situation” regarding its drivers given their respective statuses but vowed to handle it with “honesty and transparency”.
Over the summer of 2022, Aston announced that F1 veteran Fernando Alonso would replace at the end of the season future retiree Sebastian Vettel.
However, with the Spaniard’s reputation for being demanding and sometimes difficult preceding him, and with teammate Lance Stroll’s singular status as the team owner’s son, Krack thought long and hard about how to best manage the “dynamics” between the two drivers as well as the inevitable attention they would garner from the media.
In the end, the Silverstone-based outfit opted for an approach based on transparency and honesty as Krack explained in an interview with Motorsport.com.
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“We have a particular situation, obviously, because one of the drivers is the son of the owner and the other is an experienced mature driver,” he said. “So, you need to think: what are the dynamics and how are they going to be evolving?
“When Fernando joined us, many people were warning us he can be difficult, so we tried to prepare ourselves. We had to think, what is our approach – and this was not only me, it was the sporting director, and performance director – and how are we going to manage the media?
“But we needed to be aware that both Fernando and Lance had known each other forever – already from the Ferrari times. So when it started, we took the approach that we have to be open, honest and transparent with both at all times.”
Krack believed that showing full transparency to both drivers, even in challenging times, would be the most effective way of preventing issues.
“It’s not only in the good times, but also in the less good times,” he continued. “The truth is sometimes the hardest bit, and these are the most difficult conversations. But if you have them, it's so much easier after.
“It includes things like, how do we race each other? How do we handle each other? How do we treat things if we have more difficult results?”
Overall, Krack was satisfied with its approach and how things played out last season between Aston’s drivers, with both Alonso and Stroll always putting the team at the center of their concerns.
“We managed, with the contribution from both drivers and from everybody around, to keep an open, honest, transparent relationship – and this made it really easy.
“But I have to say, Lance and Fernando, the way they work with each other, the way they treat each other, does not need any intervention from our side, because they are just very mature. They put the team in the centre, and it is the same for us. For us, the team is everything.
“They know that we have nine hot competitors out there, and we don't gain anything by fighting each other. That's really very helpful. So credit to both of them for the way they handled it.”
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