Aston Martin struggled relative to its direct rivals last weekend in Bahrain, but team boss Mike Krack is confident that the outfit’s development programme that will kick off this week in Jeddah will allow it catch its rivals.
Fernando Alonso’s strong P6 performance in qualifying last weekend at Sakhir was as good as it got for Team Silverstone.
On race day, the Spaniard dropped back down to P9 at the checkered flag, while Lance Stroll did well to claim the final point of the day after the Canadian was spun around at the first corner.
While his team was challenged in Bahrain, Krack is looking forward to the inception of Aston’s development programme, with the first updated components finding their way on the team’s AMR24 as soon as next weekend in Saudi Arabia.
"We see the development,” he explained. “Because when you have race one, the development is not at race one level, it's further ahead. And we see some encouraging development there. So that makes me confident.
“[For Jeddah] we will have some small developments to improve the car. And we hope that we can be closer. And then we have to see if Fernando can pull another lap out like yesterday, that will help us to come more forward."
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Nevertheless, Red Bull’s RB20 remains the car to beat. However, Krack would be hard pressed to project when Aston will be snapping at the heels of F1’s dominant team, especially as there’s a more immediate gap to fill first.
“I cannot make any prediction on that,” he said. “But the fact is we have 24 races, we have seen last year you can make developments, you can make recoveries. I would not say let's switch off the TV now!
“I think everybody will push as much as they can. And there are some great teams around, so I would not be surprised if some of the others catching up or doing good developments.
“We're not fighting Red Bull at the moment, we're trying to fight the cars that are in front of us, which was McLaren and Mercedes today. And this is the first gap that we need to close."
Krack played down any comparison between Aston’s performance at the start of this season and its impressive opening races in 2023, pointing to how Mercedes and Ferrari’s form has improved this year relative to the same period 12 months ago.
“We must not forget that we are also often measured around the podiums of last year,” he noted. “But it was more a ranking thing than really pace. We had issues with the red cars, we gained a little bit from the circumstances as well.
“But if we are really objective, and we look at our performance, we can see that it was not that great at the time. The result was, but we were still quite far behind."
Looking back on last weekend’s curtain raiser and his team’s achievement, Krack said: “The target from the first moment was to score with both cars. We said that has to be really the target. And we managed that.
“So mission completed, but we would obviously like to have more points.
"It's early days. We tried really to get a decent balance for short run, for long run, over the three days. But I think it is it is a very good baseline.”
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