Fernando Alonso discovers crucial Aston Martin improvements required for F1 2024

Fernando Alonso has outlined the weaknesses he feels his Aston Martin team need to make to improve further in 2024.

Aston Martin had a turbulent season in F1, starting off the year as one of the quickest machines with the AMR23 landing podium after podium in Alonso’s hands.

But the performance ebbed away through the season, only to recover again towards the end of the year – the team having gone down the wrong path when it came to developments, only to bounce back by going back to basics and known configurations.

Fernando Alonso outlines the performance deficits needing addressing

Speaking to media, including PlanetF1.com, during the Abu Dhabi season finale, Alonso said he’s hopeful the AMR24 will be a more versatile weapon.

“I think we need to find some consistency,” he said.

“Maybe one of the weak points was the car has to operate in a very narrow window.

“It’s the same for everybody, but it seems that we’re struggling a little bit, and it will be nice if we can always perform always at a stable level next year.

“Also, if we can improve the straight-line speed – I think that was, in performance numbers, our weak point. Always a little bit too slow on the straights.

“If we wanted to be as fast as the others, we needed to drop too much the rear wing. Then, we ended up slow in the corners as well. So, that was probably the loop that we could not get out [of] this season.”

But it wasn’t all bad news, with Alonso full of praise for the elements he felt the car and the team had performed well.

“The strength was tyre degradation,” Alonso said. “I think Sundays the car is always very strong.

“Execution of the strategy, motivation of the team. We are a happy team; we are a young team.

“We are celebrating every result as a win and this energy is important to keep for next year.”

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As for whether Aston Martin now understand what went wrong during 2023, given the performance drop that saw them fall to fifth in the Constructors’ Championship after briefly looking capable of a top three finish early in the season, Alonso said the ideas are clear for 2024.

“I think [it was] a consequence a little bit of the development of the car,” he said.

“But, as I said, it’s the same for everybody when you try to extract extra on the performance of the car – you need to sacrifice some areas to gain in others. So, you start narrowing the window.

“But I think we have some ideas for next year as well and everything should be better.

“I think there are clear indications of some parts of the car that they were underperforming for a few events.

“There were also different philosophies on the pitlane but also for us in the way you try to extract the performance of these cars.

“I think now with all the experiments and all the knowledge of this year, we think that we understand better the direction to develop the car but these things – they are moving constantly.

“I don’t think that there is a magic bullet and a recipe to develop the car. If [there was], this could be very easy for everyone but things that you maybe trust now, in six months time because maybe the trend on the pit lane is just to move the airflow differently, they get outdated and we need to keep an eye.”

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