Szafnauer: Aston Martin ‘still not as good’ as Force India

Former Aston Martin F1 boss Otmar Szafnauer acknowledges team owner Lawrence Stroll's ambitious vision and the team’s ramping progress.

But the American also believes the Silverstone-based outfit has yet to perform as well as it did under its Force India guise.

For many seasons, Szafnauer held the reins of the team once owned by Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya and which later morphed into Racing Point following its acquisition by Stroll and then into Aston Martin F1.

While highlighting the key differences between Mallaya and Stroll, Szafnauer offered a candid perspective on the team’s evolution under two contrasting ownerships.

“The significant differences are, Vijay was hands-off – Vijay didn’t have a son in the car either,” Szafnauer told the Inside Line F1 podcast. “So because of it, there’s less emotion and more objective decision-making.”

“Both of them wanted the best on-track performance possible. They both had that drive – ‘we want better, we want better, we want better’. So I experienced that from both parties.

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“Lawrence actually spent a lot more money in being able to get that performance. It’s not that Vijay didn’t [spend], but Lawrence spent an order of magnitude more.

“Ironically, the performance at the end of Force India was better than they’re performing today.”

Under Szafnauer’s skilled leadership, Force India claimed successive fourth place finishes in F1’s Constructors’ Championship in 2016 and 2017, but fell to seventh a year later.

The team’s change of ownership led to campaigns in 2019 and 2020 in which it finished respectively P7 and P4. This was followed by a pair of seventh place results in 2021 and 2022 as the team switched its identity into Aston Martin.

But a competitive start to the 2023 season and remarkable results delivered by Fernando Alonso enabled Aston to clock in P5 at the end of the season with a hefty tally of 280 championship points.

Nevertheless, Szafnauer – who left Aston at the end of 2021 to join Alpine – paints a nuanced picture of Stroll's tenure and maintains that the Canadian’s outfit has yet to perform at the level at which Force India peaked in the past.

“After Aston Martin embarked on new factories and new management, I think they were seventh and fifth now. We’ll see what next year brings,” the 59-year-old added.

“But when I was there under Racing Point, we were fourth. The year of administration we were seventh only because we had all of our points taken away, we really should have been fourth that year.

“The following year we were seventh and then back up to fourth again. And then since then it’s been seventh [in 2021 and 2022] and fifth [in 2023]. Not as good as Force India at the end.”

Szafnauer also sheds light on the multi-pronged approach to developing Lance Stroll, including "brutally honest" engineers, support staff, and the strategic hiring of multiple world champions like Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso.

“The engineers working closely with Lance have to be sometimes brutally honest to be able to extract the best performance,” he explained.

“There are other people within the team too that help, the physiotherapist and sports psychologist and the usual entourage that everybody has or the drivers have to make sure that they’re working at the highest level.

“There’s also hiring World Champions to sit alongside Lance in order for him to be able to see what World Champions do and how they go about their business to be able to emulate that.

“So all those things, they’re in place and I think because of it they’re going to be better off.”

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