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Following the debacle of Aston Martin’s Mexico City Grand Prix weekend, Mike Krack staunchly refuted the suggestion his team was ‘lost’.
When Krack was pressed for a second time on the assertion, for a moment his staid demeanour, for want of a better word, cracked.
“You would like to push us into being in this lost direction. You asked me already for the second time,” retorted Aston Martin’s team principal. “I can tell you honestly, we’re not!
“We are analysing our data, and we are trying to take the correct solutions from it. Coming from Austin to here (Mexico), it’s not that straightforward, that a car that works in Austin, you just put it on the track here and everything works.
“It’s not an easy task to understand everything, how the track evolves, how the conditions change when you bring upgrades, and this takes time and analysis.
“It’s important that at the end of the weekend, you do a proper analysis and you move on.”
Krack was speaking on the back of Aston Martin’s worst weekend of the season when, for all intents and purposes, it did appear lost after introducing a raft of upgrades ahead of the United States GP.
The fact that event was a sprint weekend, affording the team only one practice session to analyse and optimise prior to Friday evening qualifying, and the lockdown of the cars in parc fermé for the remainder of the weekend did not help matters.
Following sprint Saturday, Aston Martin opted to break parc fermé in order to make changes to its cars, taking different routes as Lance Stroll ran with the package for the Circuit of the Americas, whilst the team reverted to the Qatar GP spec for Fernando Alonso’s AMR23.
With both starting from the pitlane, Stroll scored a creditable seventh, in contrast to Alonso who was forced to retire seven laps from home with damage to the floor.
If Aston Martin thought it had a handle on its machinery, they were proven wrong in Mexico City where Alonso spun twice – on one hair-raising occasion managing to stay out of the barriers – whilst the two-time F1 champion and Stroll bemoaned throughout of a lack of confidence in the car.
Both drivers retired, albeit with Stroll, who had again started from the pit lane, classified 17th and last. At that stage, it appeared as if Aston Martin was most certainly all at sea.
Cue the post-race questions about the team being lost, and Krack’s abrupt response, further insisting the team now had two sets of data from different-spec cars and from very different circuits and conditions to sift through.
Onto Brazil, where Aston Martin delivered its best-all-round result since the third race of the year in Australia, scoring 25 points, remarkably four more than it had amassed during the previous six races combined.
It would appear from all the data gathered, and the in-depth analysis it emerged with a car capable again of challenging McLaren, Mercedes, and Ferrari, with Stroll suggesting it was very much a ‘mix-and-match’ as it took parts from its plans for next season and allied them with those from throughout this campaign.
“In a way, we overly said we would need to try some things for next year, which we did in a couple of races,” said Krack, referring to Austin and Mexico City.
“And when we came here (São Paulo), we said ‘Okay, what is the best package we have from what we have run this year?’
“We made the choice, what we thought was the right one, and this led to a more competitive car. It’s like a mix. You have a range of parts, you combine them.
“I’ve said it many, many times that the cars are very complicated and you need to really understand the different areas of the car and how they interact with each other.
‘There is a lot of interaction between parts, and it’s not only the floor. Now we have to see how we go for the next two (races in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi).
“But it shows if we provide them with the right car, with the right behaviour, then both drivers can achieve incredible results.”
The relief was palpable inside Aston Martin, from Alonso’s outpouring of emotion as he took to the podium and collected his trophy, to the garage where team personnel were celebrating and hugging one another as if they had won the race.
Naturally, Krack offered credit where it was due to the team back at its new Silverstone campus for burning the midnight oil.
“It shows what a strong team we are,” said Krack. “We have kept together in difficult times after some problems in a couple of races in which we were not strong.
“We had the tripleheader, which is brutal, in terms of workload, being away in different time zones, heat, a lot of work with not so many results.
“And then to come back like we did, it’s of great credit to everybody involved – the track team and at the campus where the lights didn’t go off. You can believe me on this, in all that time.
“It shows that if you’re a strong team, if you trust each other, believe in each other, then you can do amazing things, or manage amazing turnarounds.
“One week ago, we were on the other side of the grid (in the pitlane). It shows sometimes how things can go.
“But after Mexico, the reaction we have shown as a team shows we are really gearing up for more.”
