How Aston Martin Plans to Get Back to F1 Relevance

• Aston Martin enters the stretch run of the Formula 1 season in ninth place in the Constructors' Standings.

• “We are not where we want to be," Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack says.

• Next season, Fernando Alonso will team up with Lance Stroll, now a veteran of more than 100 Grands Prix, and whose presence on the grid is invariably associated with his father Lawrence Stroll's ownership of Aston Martin.

It has been four years since Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll acquired the Force India Formula 1 team and set about exploiting its potential.

It was a team that had a rich history of punching above its weight as an underdog, and the (briefly) rebranded entity, Racing Point, captured a shock win in 2020 and fourth in the championship, aided by its clever imitation of the previous year’s Mercedes design.

Its rebrand as Aston Martin for 2021—with a view on the new 2022 regulations—was supposed to herald in a new era of success and prolonged competitiveness.

But that has not yet happened.

Aston Martin slipped to seventh in 2021, hurt by subtle yet critical tweaks to Formula 1’s floor rules, while this year the squad has slumped to ninth in the competitive order, on just 25 points.

“It did not go according to our expectations,” is the blunt assessment of Aston Martin’s 2022 by team principal Mike Krack, who took up the reins in March, in an interview with Autoweek. “We are not where we want to be. We are P9—this is far, far away from our ambition. The performance of the car has been a disappointment.”

Aston Martin’s season began in wretched style, failing to score across the first three events, its predicament accentuated by Sebastian Vettel’s Covid absence. Australia was a particular nadir, with a string of incidents and accidents leaving its drivers bereft of confidence, while points for Williams relegated Aston Martin to plum last.

Since then it has scored in 10 of the following 13 Grands Prix, a credible statistic, albeit often in the lower reaches of the top 10. It has essentially spent the year playing catch-up, having introduced a revised concept at May’s Spanish Grand Prix, after realizing that its initial car design was flawed.

“We need to consider there was a significant change in regulations and different directions were taken by different teams,” Krack said.

“We realized after a couple of races we could not go further in that direction, even though it was very promising in terms of performance—but we couldn’t run it because of the porpoising issues that we were having. We had to change concepts, and this really set us back. We were always a couple of races behind. Disappointing, explainable, now next year the rules are staying more consistent so we should be on it from the beginning.

“But still: we need to deliver. We did not have a good car in ‘21, we have not had a good car in ‘22.”

Team owner Stroll has been “very patient—and we have to admire his patience,” says Krack, but there remains high ambition.

“He knows he made these investments, he would like to have success come quicker—we all want that—but he is also very aware that you cannot just change it like a switch. I admire his patience, and I think through the years coming, this patience will also have to be less. He put everything on the table that we need, and we want, so now it is up to us to deliver.”