Aston Martin’s confidence recovered as teams prepare for 2024 development race

Aston Martin are confident of avoiding a repeat of last year’s mid-season slump with Dan Fallows insisting they “can” upgrade a car.

Last year Aston Martin were quick out of the blocks as the Silverstone team emerged as Red Bull’s closest challengers with Fernando Alonso scoring six podiums in the first eight races.

But as the likes of Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren began to hit their strides, Aston Martin’s form took a dip.

‘We can put upgrades on the car with confidence this year’

Technical director Dan Fallows admitted their simulation data sent the team down the “wrong” path with the car’s development, so much so Lando Norris quipped that every upgrade from Aston Martin made the car “slower”.

Putting aside what they dubbed on-track R&D work in the latter part of the year, Alonso rebounded to finish on the podium at the Brazilian Grand Prix before going on to hold off Charles Leclerc to finish P4 in the Drivers’ Championship.

Aston Martin were fifth in the Constructors’, 22 points behind McLaren who were the team that made the biggest in-season gains.

Fallows says it is part of the lessons the team learned.

“We’re learning a lot about us as a team,” Fallows told the media, including PlanetF1.com. “We’ve learned a lot last year, and that includes operationally and about how we approach different things, how we approach putting developments on the car.

“There’s always a certain amount of danger when you’re developing a car that you’re going to have to make some trade-offs and those trade-offs may or may not be as good as you’d like.

“There’s just something in an engineering terms you have to kind of live with.

“But we’ve learned a lot about these rules, and we’ve learned a lot about how these cars need to perform, and how to get the best out of the aerodynamics of the car.

“So I think we’re confident we’ve learned a lot of lessons and that we can put upgrades on the car with confidence this year, which is exactly what we’re aiming to do.”

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The former Red Bull man believes Aston Martin can take encouragement from the fact they were able to recover from their mid-season slump

“When we look at the trajectory of last season, we gave ourselves some challenges,” he added. “And we’ve managed to solve them.

“We came off at the end of the season having got on top of some issues that we introduced into the car mid-season and ended up with a podium in Brazil.

“So we just showed that there is a huge amount of determination and capability in this team.

“But it’s important to us that it represented momentum, and we wanted to take that momentum into the winter and then into this car, which I’m confident we have done.”

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