Mike Krack is confident lessons have been learned after feeling Aston Martin was “a bit greedy” and took too much risk with its qualifying strategy for the Miami Grand Prix.
The team felt it could get through Q1 on one set of tyres as it sought to save a set of softs for the crucial Q3. Prior to the weekend, it had a 100 percent success rate in reaching that session with both drivers this season.
Yet whilst Fernando Alonso managed to make it into Q2, Lance Stroll missed out by 0.151s to AlphaTauri’s Nyck de Vries, and had to start 18th.
Alonso finished three-tenths of a second quicker than Stroll, with the difference all in the final sector, before going on to qualify second on the grid courtesy of a red-flag interrupted Q3 caused by Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc’s accident.
Team boss Krack feels that a decision that was made on the fly, and with Stroll’s blessing, was unnecessary in hindsight and will unlikely be repeated in the future.
“At the end of the day, we did not go into qualifying three (with both cars),” said Krack. “This is the final verdict of it, and we want to have both cars in Q3.
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“As a team, you have some stats, sim predictions, to gauge what the cut-off will be, and in this, we were not good enough.
“I think we were maybe a bit greedy trying to move forward and carry it (the extra softs) into qualifying three to have an additional set.
“But we have to take our lesson from it and do better next time
“But these are the calls that you do live, within 30 seconds. We were in discussion with Lance, and we should have called him in.
“There was no need to take as much of a risk as we did.”
Aston “too aggressive” – McCullough
Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough concurred with Krack that the team had overplayed its hand, believing it had the pace to again get through to Q2 with both cars, even on a track that rapidly was evolving.
“Obviously, we’d walked the cars through to quali three every time so far this season, often using two sets in quali one, but then having fewer sets for quali two and quali three,” said McCullough, when asked about the decision by Speedcafe.
“Ultimately, the risk-reward was a bit the wrong way for Lance, and he was a tenth-and-a-half (of a second) shy, so we ended up with some nice shiny new tires we never got to use.
“With time again, we’d have fitted another new set of tyres, but it’s always that balance between saving race tyres and what to do in quali.
“We had the potential to go through but it was too close. It was too close with Fernando as well. We shouldn’t have been that aggressive really.”
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