Aston Martin boss admits team must ‘get its act together’ after Alonso pain

Fernando Alonso’s Canadian Grand Prix was undone by pain caused by a pressure point on his seat, and team boss Mike Krack has admitted that there are operational elements in which Aston Martin “needs to get its act together”.

Alonso’s Montreal race came to a premature end due to a problem with his race seat, which has been a persistent problem for some time.

Fernando Alonso’s seat pain exposes Aston Martin’s operational concerns

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• Why Fernando Alonso retired in Canada with seat pain.
• Mike Krack’s blunt Aston Martin verdict after multiple mistakes.
• Where Aston Martin really stands on performance right now.

With Aston Martin no longer having to overly concern itself about reliability issues and the vibrations that have plagued it since the pre-season, thoughts have turned more towards starting to unlock performance and balance from the AMR26.

There were some grounds for optimism over the Canadian weekend, with Alonso just three-tenths of a second off a Haas and a Williams in Q1, while the team now looks to be the measure of Cadillac at the tail of the field.

In the Grand Prix itself, a bold choice to start on the soft tyre saw Alonso climb as high as 10th place on the first lap after some clever positioning through the opening corners saw the two-time F1 World Champion use his experience to climb up the order.

However, having fallen back into the lower midfield as the pace of its rivals proved too much, Alonso’s day came to an early end on Lap 23 as a broken seat forced him into the pits.

The Spaniard explained the issue afterwards as being a necessary choice due to excessive levels of discomfort – not the first time he’s had to end a race early this year due to such a factor, having retired in China due to the extent of the vibrations through the chassis.

“Yeah, we had this seat issue where I feel more and more uncomfortable with the laps, the position doesn’t feel the right one, and we were obviously out of the points, quite far from the points, and no threat of rain anymore,” Alonso explained.

“So, yeah, we decided to stop the pain.

“We tried to modify a few things last night, didn’t work, so we’ll try to make a new one for Monaco.”

The incident with the seat, chief trackside officer Mike Krack revealed, is not a new obstacle for Aston Martin, but has been one growing in prominence along with Alonso’s discomfort.

“He has been uncomfortable for a while; never to the point where it was really like a showstopper,” he said.

“But you know it’s like a pressure point, where you feel it gets worse and worse, and I think we need to reconsider a little bit the positioning.

“You try, with these cars, to be as low as you can, and, when you look at how the drivers used to sit over the last few years, it goes more and more and more into a lying position, and we need to check whether we have done a step too far, but it’s something we need to check.”

In his eyes, it’s unlikely that Alonso will need a whole new seat fit done. “No, I don’t think so,” he said, “I think we need to reconsider, maybe a little bit, going back to how we have been in the past.”

In the other car, Lance Stroll finished as second-last of the classified runners, down in 15th, four laps off the lead, having struggled to get the tyres into the correct working window throughout the 68-lap event.

With the team being tripped up by what is a standard operational item in the positioning of the seat in Alonso’s car, it wasn’t the only such incident of the weekend: in qualifying, Stroll had been sent out on track with wheel covers still attached, the outer trim of which detached in the pitlane before the inner wheel cover came loose on his outlap.

It led to the FIA penalising the team €7,500, on top of an earlier €5,000 fine for an unsafe release of Alonso into the path of Alpine’s Franco Colapinto.

Such a spate of incidents saw Krack admit the team needed to “get its act together” on what could be viewed as basic operations.

“Not so nice, as you can imagine,” he said, when asked how the debrief after Canada is likely to progress.

“Obviously, one is independent of the other, so you can have the car performance that is not where we want it to be, but that is independent of getting your act together.

“We have done better in the past, and we will do better in the future, but we had a few glitches this weekend that we need to get better at. [There was] the wheel cover that Lance lost, and we also had to start from the pit lane in the Sprint race.

“That is obviously not ideal, and we will have to regroup and work on these issues so that they do not happen again.”

With Aston Martin having not had to be overly concerned by its operational prowess through the opening handful of races while Honda got to grips with the reliability issues that meant the team was unable to rack up significant mileage with an eye to performance, Krack said there had been no surprises about where the team had found itself on track as the focus has moved on from technical troubleshooting.

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“From a pure performance point of view, I think we were where we expected to be,” he said.

“At the beginning of the race, with a couple of good calls, you find yourself in positions where you then start to hope.

“I think Fernando was running 10th at one point, and Lance was running 14th, starting from the pit lane, so everything looks flattering, but the reality kicks in also quickly, and you have to always remind yourself where did we expect ourselves to be.

“Because, in F1, you normally end where you belong, unless there is a completely chaotic race.

“When we saw people going out, more attrition, we thought, ‘Okay, let’s keep going’, we never know in Canada what’s happening next, but then there was not more after that.

“So I think, at the end of the day, from a reliability point of view, aside from the operational stuff that we mentioned earlier. I think on the PU side, there was not a single issue, not a single fault.

“We have come a long way, but the performance is not where it should be.”

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