F1 News, Reports and Race Results

'No quick fix' for Aston issues, Alonso warned

Last weekends Spanish Grand Prix was another frustrating experience for Aston Martin, with neither Fernando Alonso nor Lance Stroll finishing in the top ten for the second time in three races..

The team is currently in fifth place in the constructors championship. But while it's 30 points ahead of RB, that is almost a hundred behind Mercedes who are ahead of them in the standings.

Alonso himself started the season with six consecutive top tens. While he was sixth in Montreal, he didn't finish in the points in Imola, Monaco or Barcelona leaving him ninth in the drivers championship.

While the team is continuing to develop new upgrades all the time for the AMR24, team principal Mike Krack has admitted that with a flurry of back-to-back races on the calendar it will be difficult to turn things around straightaway.

"You have now five races in six weeks," he explained, with last week's Spanish GP followed by races in Spielberg and Silverstone over consecutive weekends. "That is one of the issues that you have.

"We had quite a lot of understanding after Monaco, Imola," he argued. "And Canada as well, where we scored 14 points by the way with the same car. But it's about fixing [the problems].

"You have no time, that's the main problem at the moment," he said. "So we have to hang on like this, get the best out of the car each weekend and bring these parts as quick as possible."

Krack dismissed concerns that team owner Lawrence Stroll was getting impatient with the team's efforts to turn things around to its peak days at the start of 2023.

"He's very knowledgeable about how Formula 1 works, how F1 operates," Krack said of Stroll's management style. "Even if he's not patient, he knows that making parts takes time. So he's up to date with everything, and it's for us now to deliver them."

Alonso himself was also realistic about what was possible in the short term, and said he understood his boss's point, telling the media in Spain this week: "I have to share the optimism.

"From what I've seen, it's encouraging," he insisted. "We have clearly a better understanding than we had before. That is also what makes us confident looking forward.

"We cannot get too frustrated," he continued. "It's time to work harder, to talk less, to deliver more. It's what we want to do.

"We will continue to bring parts as soon as they become ready, starting in the next races, so it's not we should focus only on [bringing updates to] Budapest. But we should really try to improve as quick as possible."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.

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