Aston Martin boss Mike Krack has said his team is remaining realistic as rivals teams look to have taken a step beyond the Silverstone operation.
In the opening stanza of the season, Aston Martin proved to be Red Bull’s nearest challenger, with six podiums from the opening eight races.
It’s most recent was second in the Canadian Grand Prix, recorded by Fernando Alonso who matched his season’s best performance, having been runner up in Monaco.
Since then, however, results have been harder to come by.
Alonso was fifth in Austria with team-mate Lance Stroll ninth, going on to finish seventh in the British Grand Prix and ninth in Hungary last weekend.
Across those three events, Aston Martin has added a total of 29 points to its tally, including the nine it scored in the F1 Sprint in Austria.
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McLaren, by contrast, has amassed 65 points and has risen to fifth in the constructors’ championship – though still 97 points in arrears of Aston Martin.
“The development race is flat out,” Krack said.
“I think we need to keep up; we need to be aware that some teams have done a good job also in the meantime.
“The McLarens have done an extremely good job now with their updates and this is for us also to try and catch them again.
“This is typical for everyone,” he added.
“You have to be humble about it and be realistic where you are, and not being disappointed or over-excited.
“It’s just continue the hard work and try to improve for the races to come.”
While the result in Hungary was not there, that does not necessarily make it a bad weekend as Aston Martin still managed a double points finish with Stroll moving up from 14th to 10th in the race.
There were hopes of a stronger result, but putting aside the positions themselves, there were positive signs for Krack.
“People always say Budapest is like Monaco,” he said, referencing Alonso’s podium on the streets of the principality.
“It’s not at all.
“We were quite realistic about where we wanted to be. We were more optimistic than we were for Silverstone, Austria, and while the position finally is now where we would like to have, the gap to the front is much, much smaller than it was in the last two races.
“So from that point of view, I think the prediction was okay but again, you have cars in between that you were not expecting in the first case, and two other cars that you expected to confirm.”
Aston Martin remains third in the constructors’ championship behind Red Bull and Mercedes, now tailing the latter by 22 points.
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