When its owner is best known as a fashion mogul, the style shines easily for a Formula 1 team. But for the Aston Martin squad in 2024, the substance was missing: better on-track results.
The green team couldn’t replicate its highly promising results from the year before when it put up a strong fight against Red Bull, the eventual winners of the title.
That “added a lot of pressure on the whole system” at Aston, Mike Krack, the team principal, said in an interview. This only increased when the team started 2024 no better than it had ended the previous year, as ultimately the fifth-fastest squad once again, hundreds of points behind the leaders.
“We cannot be happy with how our season went,” Krack said.
Because things then got worse. It dropped back from racing well against some of the four quicker teams, such as McLaren and Mercedes, during the year’s early rounds. When the season was over, the team had scored 94 points, compared with 280 last year.
“We were hoping for more,” said Fernando Alonso, the Aston driver from Spain. “Especially at the beginning of the year, we started strong, and there were a couple of upgrades coming to the car that we were dreaming to finish high on the season and maybe fighting for podiums or something.”
Alonso scored Aston’s best result of the year, fifth, in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, the second race. But by the season’s halfway point, Aston was 305 points off the teams’ championship lead and 153 behind the fourth-place Mercedes.
Aston, which had eight finishes on the podium in 2023, didn’t have one this year.
“We just haven’t added the performance that we needed for the car to stay in the position where we started the season,” said the driver Lance Stroll, the son of the team owner Lawrence Stroll, a Canadian billionaire.
This isn’t strictly true. Aston has held fifth — the position it secured in last year’s championship — from the season opener in Bahrain all the way to this month’s finale in Abu Dhabi.
But that it has not been able to equal the pace of its rivals is what concerns team insiders the most. The team’s halfway-stage points total gave it nearly 20 percent of the leading haul. Come the year’s end, it had dipped to under 15 percent.
This goes back to May’s Miami and Emilia-Romagna races. At Miami, McLaren and Mercedes, Aston’s engine supplier, made what Krack called “good steps” in making their cars faster with new aerodynamic parts. Aston made changes to its car at the Imola circuit at Emilia-Romagna, but these backfired badly.
“We put all our hopes on the Imola upgrade package, which was promising but it didn’t deliver,” Krack said.
Aston had to understand why its hopes to make its car faster seemed to have had the opposite effect.
“The updates have sort of broadly delivered what we were expecting,” said Dan Fallows, the engineer who oversaw the car’s design.
“But at the same time, there’s been aspects that haven’t quite performed as expected or have exaggerated things on the car that we maybe didn’t want exaggerated.”
This is how Alonso and Lance Stroll found the car harder to drive once it was running the new parts at Emilia-Romagna. Its rear end would turn too fast in some corners, and its front not fast enough in others. Both situations meant slower lap times.
Alonso even crashed while running the new parts in the final practice session at Imola. He then finished last in the Imola qualifying.
In the months and races that followed, Aston worked out what went wrong.
Fallows, who has been removed from his previous position as Aston’s technical director, suggested the current rules on car design are a part of the problem. They involve complicated aerodynamic principals but also have restrictions that make it hard for teams to rectify mistakes.
“Your choice is whether you put something on which is, you believe, a step forward, but not necessarily unequivocal,” he said. “And you hope that the upsides of it are sufficient to outweigh the potential downsides. Or you simply wait until you’ve got something which is unequivocally better.”
Krack said Aston was “not diligent enough” in assessing if its plans for making its car faster at Imola would instead introduce the handling problems its drivers encountered.
Aston’s subsequent effort resulted in a new series of reworked aerodynamic parts being added to the car at the Hungarian Grand Prix in July. These made the car more predictable to drive again, and Alonso scored points there and at the next two races. He then matched the team’s second-best result, sixth, at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in September.
“It’s only really been kind of in the latter part of the year that we had some sort of fairly big revelations,” Fallows said.
But the story of Aston’s 2024 takes in a lot of off-track maneuvering, too.
Martin Whitmarsh was replaced as Aston’s group chief executive by Andy Cowell in July. He led the engine-building division that powered Mercedes to eight straight Formula 1 Constructors’ championships from 2014 to 2021. Cowell left Mercedes midway through 2020.
But Aston made an even more high-profile signing when they hired the respected Formula 1 car designer Adrian Newey in September after he decided to leave Red Bull. Newey’s reputation was forged on winning titles for every team he has worked for since the early 1990s.
Krack said he believed that Lawrence Stroll made the changes because he thought his current Formula 1 team management was “not good enough.”
“Or that we are lost — maybe,” Krack added. “And he needs to provide more support.”
As he prepared to leave his previous role, Fallows said his biggest frustration was how Aston was “night and day better compared to where we were two or three years ago.”
It has built a $250 million factory and improved how it interacts with suppliers — a major transformation for the team, which nearly went out of business under its previous owner.
But changes to make the best cars takes a long time in Formula 1 because these machines are so complex.
But the team is about to have its own wind tunnel, vital for designing cars, which is scheduled to open soon at the team’s factory. Aston had been renting a tunnel from Mercedes in recent years.
Such new equipment is why, Fallows said, “I am 100 percent confident that the journey will lead to that great success.”
But even if the team is successful in making its 2025 car better than its current one, the lessons of 2024 are clear. Aston does not want to have a third successive poor season, given it has what Krack calls an “also impatient” team owner.
“It’s a concern,” Krack said. “Because if you have done that twice in a row, it’s not a one-off.”
