(Motorsport-Total.com) – Aston Martin will bring an upgrade to the Canadian Grand Prix in just under two weeks. The announcement follows Barcelona’s race weekend, when the team fell behind Mercedes and Ferrari in the battle for the position of closest challenger to Red Bull.
In Barcelona, Aston Martin couldn’t keep pace with Mercedes
With rivals having improved their cars heavily over the past two races, Aston Martin’s underperformance could suggest it has been overtaken, lagging behind even in rolling out updates.
Earlier, Fernando Alonso, who missed out on the podium for only the second time this season at Barcelona, had urged his team to speed up the rollout of upgrades if they were to continue fighting for podiums on a regular basis.
Aston Martin team boss Mike Krack said Alonso was right to push to do more, but insists there are plans for future improvements. “He’s right when he asks us and urges us to do it,” Krack says. “Something is going to happen in Canada. It will be a stage.”
While Mercedes and Ferrari believe they have evolved in form to change the current pecking order, Aston Martin believe this is premature. When asked if he felt his rivals’ improvements had turned things around, Krack replied, “No, I don’t think so.”
He points to the fact that although Aston Martin struggled with the soft tires in the first stint in Barcelona, things seemed to level off as everyone switched to harder compounds as the race progressed.
“Later in the race, when we put on the hard tyres, for example, we were back in the game compared to our rivals”, underlines the team boss.
Can a race engineer really ignore his driver like that? And has Mercedes perhaps overtaken Ferrari with updates?
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“So we really need to understand what happened at the start of the race. It got cloudy very quickly, changing from very sunny to cloudy, and we thought that would help the soft tyres. But we have to understand why there is this difference in competitiveness at different points in the race.”
Krack also believes that the order in Spain does not directly reflect the pace of the top teams: “I think it’s too early or too easy to say because we haven’t seen the whole situation in qualifying.”
Alonso’s chances in the race were badly affected by an error in Q1. Because his underbody was damaged and he didn’t make it to the front row.
“It’s like at the beginning of the year when you think you need three races to see where we really are,” said the Aston Martin team boss, adding: “It may well be that ‘others have a higher rate. But our early analysis doesn’t reflect that yet.’
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