The Aston Martin is a Mercedes and Red Bull look-alike, apparently. Photo / Don Kennedy
Predictably, pre-season testing in Bahrain, and the Bahrain GP result, proved that the Red Bull team remains firmly on top.
World champion Max Verstappen had a relatively easy victory in the season-opening race, his only challenge coming initially from the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc, and at a respectful distance, the other Red Bull driven by Sergio Perez. The main surprise, of course, was the performance of the Aston Martin duo of Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll, who finished third and sixth respectively.
Alonso was voted driver of the race, and media hype since has the Aston Martin tagged as the second-best car on the grid, which is a compliment that may flatter to deceive. Is it really possible that a car that was generally one-and-a-half to two seconds off the pace in 2022 can suddenly have gained at least a second on the top team? The evidence from Bahrain suggests it may have, although Alonso, for one, was quick to point out that until they have raced in this weekend’s Saudi Arabia GP at the Jeddah circuit, and then in Melbourne, Australia two weeks later, it may be too soon to say Aston Martin has broken permanently into the top three. And if it has, the question is: at the expense of which team?
The answer would seem to be the Mercedes team, Constructors’ champions from 2014 through to 2021. Mercedes’ boss described the fifth-place finish for Lewis Hamilton and seventh-place finish for George Russell as the “worst-ever race” for his team. For a team so used to winning, that statement may not be much of an exaggeration. Mercedes is now talking about ditching the car they raced in Bahrain and turning to Plan B, which is to produce and race an alternative version that has apparently already been wind-tunnel-tested.
Revising or developing a car during a season is nothing new. After all, that’s exactly what Mercedes did in 2022 to overcome the problem of porpoising that was evident in the first race last year, even though Hamilton finished third, thanks largely to neither Red Bull drivers finishing that race. Mercedes did improve as the season progressed, to the extent Russell was able to take victory in the Brazilian GP, his first Grand Prix victory, which was also the Mercedes team’s only win last year. But it is a totally different scenario to be considering making huge changes to a car after just one race.
Wolff’s pessimism will be music to the ears of his rivals, and almost deafening for Hamilton, who has indicated he wants to keep on racing until he has won an eighth title. There is already speculation that Hamilton won’t extend his Mercedes contract when it expires at year-end, so he is free to join another team.
Wolff had said after qualifying in Bahrain that he did “not think this package is going to be competitive eventually” and indicated Mercedes had given it their “best go, and now we just need to all regroup and sit down with the engineers. There are no holy cows, and we need to decide the development direction that we want to pursue, in order to be competitive, to win races”.
After the Grand Prix, Wolff was adamant that despite the progress he thought the team had made at the end of last season, the new car suggested the deficit to Red Bull was much greater than they thought.
“I think we’ve almost doubled, if not tripled, to get to Red Bull,” he said, referring to that deficit. “This is what we need to look at. Everything in between, the Ferraris, the Astons, that’s just a sideshow.”
“Everything is bad. The single-lap pace is still good, but in the race we saw the consequences, and to put it bluntly, we are lacking down-force and sliding the tyres and going backwards,” he added.
Despite dismissing Aston Martin as a “sideshow”, Wolff had to admit that the team did a “better job” over the winter.
“We can only take our hats off to what they have done. They’ve gained two seconds in six months and their car is half ours, considering they use the same gearbox, engine and rear suspension, plus we also share the same wind tunnel. So, we just have to recognize that they did a better job than us.”
Sky Sports commentator and former driver Martin Brundle thinks Mercedes needed to take a step backwards before moving forward, indicating that is what Aston Martin did.
“Toto is clear: ‘There is nothing wrong with our power unit, there is nothing wrong with our rear suspension, nothing wrong with the gearbox, all of which are on the Aston.’ And so you look at the Aston, it’s a Red Bull copy that’s more or less influenced by the Red Bull,” Brundle says.
“So that’s what Mercedes will have to do. But if you’re a designer at Mercedes, how will you feel?”
Added to Wolff’s pessimistic outlook were the post-race comments of Hamilton, who says the team hasn’t listened to him.
“Last year, I told them the issues that are with the car,” Hamilton said. “Like, I’ve driven so many cars in my life, so I know what a car needs, I know what a car doesn’t need. And I think it’s really about accountability - it’s about owning up and saying, ‘Yeah, you know what, we didn’t listen to you, it’s not where it needs to be, and we’ve got work to do’.”
“We’re still multi-world champions, you know, it’s just they haven’t got it right this time, [and] they didn’t get it right last year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get it right moving forward.”
When the Aston Martin raced as Racing Point, the team’s car was dubbed a “pink Mercedes” because it so resembled the Mercedes car. Now it is being compared to the Red Bull, having produced a car that bears strong similarities to it, which is none too surprising, considering the team acquired Dan Fallows - a British aerodynamicist who was formerly the head of aerodynamics at Red Bull - at the beginning of 2022 to become the team’s technical director. Helmut Marko, the adviser to Red Bull, has raised questions as to what Fallows may have brought to his new team.
“It’s true that what Fallows had in his head cannot be erased,” Marko accepted. “Copying the focus is not prohibited, but can you copy in such detail without having documentation of our car? We had three Red Bulls on the podium, only the last one with a different engine.”
Marko did nonetheless acknowledge that Alonso had done a great job to bring his Aston Martin home into a podium position.
“I said before the race: Alonso will be third,” Marko stated.
“His fight with Hamilton was incredible. It was a tough duel, but fair. Really old-school. If Fernando had started further up, he surely would have been a threat to us.”
Verstappen believes it is only a matter of time before Alonso wins races.
“I hope so for Fernando as well, because he has had a few years where there was not really a possibility to fight at the front,” he said in the Bahrain post-race press conference. “So I’m happy to see him sitting here already in race one. I think also again, I mentioned it before, but at Aston Martin, they really have the spirit and drive. They want to win, and they’ve hired a lot of good people. So, I guess it can only get better for them.”
“If you have the right people in charge, and they really want to win and they hire the right people, anything is possible.”
Those arrivals at Aston Martin, in addition to Fellows, include former McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh and French aerodynamicist Eric Blandin, who joined Aston Martin in 2021 after 10 years with Mercedes.
But the biggest addition of all was Alonso, the most experienced driver in F1, who seems to be defying the age factor. Sky Sports commentator David Croft said after the overtake on Hamilton, the 41-year-old was driving with “all the keenness of the friskiest spring chicken”.
Brundle commented: “That’s so Fernando, isn’t it? He sort of drives everyone else’s car around him as well as his own, and that’s a brilliant talent, that the likes of Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton, of course, were just so good at. They need less capacity to drive their own car, which gives them a chance to think about what’s going on in the race.”
During the post-race interviews, Stroll walked up to Alonso, and after the two embraced, asked his new teammate: “Are you happy now, happy you’re not at Alpine?”
Alonso replied he was happy to be in green. As he should be, given the Alpines finished ninth for Pierre Gasly, and nineteenth for Esteban Ocon, the latter incurring a time penalty for being out of position on the grid, another penalty for serving that penalty incorrectly, and then speeding in the pitlane.
Will the advances made by Aston Martin in Bahrain be sustained in Saudi Arabia? And are the Mercedes cars really as bad as Wolff, and to a lesser extent Hamilton, suggested in Bahrain? Alonso says his new car in Bahrain was “just the beginning. This is not the final car, this is just the starting core of this concept that we changed over winter”.
“I think some of the top teams just kept the philosophy that they had last year. Red Bull or Ferrari, they kept more of the same shapes.”
The shape of the Red Bull paid dividends in Bahrain, and will likely do the same in Jeddah, so the question is whether the Aston Martin will still be mixing it with Ferrari and Mercedes.
Alonso doesn’t think his team’s rise is due to the new regulations. Rather, he says it is due to the vision and ambition of Lawrence Stroll and being willing to do whatever it takes to win. Time will tell whether the car that resembled a Mercedes is now the new Mercedes, yearning to be the new Red Bull.
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