Has Bernie Collins found the secret to ‘phenomenal’ Aston Martin turnaround?

After an impressive start to the F1 2024 season, Aston Martin has struggled to find its competitive footing — but at the Hungarian Grand Prix in 2025, the team lit up the timing charts.

Former F1 strategist turned pundit Bernie Collins has pinpointed why she believes that Aston’s performance wasn’t a fluke, and what led to the performance turnaround.

Bernie Collins explains Aston Martin’s Hungarian GP turnaround

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

The Hungarian Grand Prix weekend kicked off with bad news for Aston Martin: Fernando Alonso was set to skip Free Practice 1, citing a minor injury to a muscle in his back.

Yet the moment the cars hit the track, one thing was clear: The AMR25 was quick.

Come qualifying, Alonso secured a fifth-place starting slot, with teammate Lance Stroll lining up alongside him in sixth. After the chequered flag waved on Sunday, Alonso had held fifth place, while Stroll had dropped back to seventh.

That left Aston Martin sixth place in the World Constructors’ Championship after what has been an otherwise challenging start to the season.

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But what exactly happened? Why did Aston Martin find that pace?

Bernie Collins — former strategist for Aston Martin turned F1 pundit — offered her explanation on the Sky Sports F1 podcast at the close of the weekend: “They appear to have just brought a new front wing.

“The running discussion in the paddock is they’re running a new front wing with an old floor,” she continued.

Hungary was a strong performance, but can it last for the remainder of the season? Collins argues that that remains to be seen.

“Some of it will be circuit-specific,” she said, “but the turnaround has been phenomenal, given we have been at high-downforce tracks this year, and the car has performed nothing like it did this weekend.”

In a sport like F1, even a seemingly minor tweak can make all the difference, but Collins took time to explain just how that transformation works.

“So, something in their new front wing — and it’s hard, I guess, for people to realise that just one component or one assembly can make such a big difference to car performance — but if the old front wing, something about how the air was flowing off that, affects the remainder of the car,” she said.

“So if the old front wing — maybe the wing was working, but it wasn’t allowing components in the floor to work, then a single component like the front wing may allow better airflow to the rest of the car.

“Suddenly, the whole floor is working better, the diffuser’s working better, the rear wing’s working better.

“So just getting one assembly correct — particularly front wing or a front brake duct, anything like that that’s affecting a lot of the airflow further back in the car — it can turn your performance around quite quickly.”

However, Collins is not convinced that this will result in a complete performance turnaround for Aston Martin, since one race does not necessarily guarantee season-long performance, but it’s a start.

“We need to go to more circuits to see that that holds across a range of downforce levels,” she explained. “But such positive signs for Aston Martin.

“I think they were a team that had sort of written off their year because the car just wasn’t working. Alonso was very unhappy.

“That’s real positive for them and gives them positive data going forward in terms of what they’re working on in the wind tunnel, what they’re working on in fluid dynamics, what they’re working on in the simulator — like, if they can understand why the car worked this weekend, that gives them a lot of confidence in their design work going forward.”

Collins is correct, but for the moment, it doesn’t seem as if Aston Martin knows where that pace came from.

Speaking to media, including PlanetF1.com, after the race, Alonso noted that the pace increase was “a surprise, definitely. It’s a nice surprise.

“The good thing is that we were competitive and we were fast.

“The concerning thing is that we don’t know why. In a way, we need this week at the factory to analyse exactly what are the differences between Spa and Hungary, what are the differences on the car as well, on the set-up, on the aero devices that we were racing with.

“The main thing for us was the front wing that was new this weekend.

“If that front wing gives us that much performance, that’s very good news. But I think that has to be understood at the moment.”

Aston Martin’s true pace, then, will only reveal itself after the conclusion of summer break.

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