2024 F1 season previews: Can Lance Stroll deliver for Aston Martin?

Just before pre-season testing for the 2024 F1 season, it’s worth going back in time.

One year ago, the grid descended on the Bahrain International Circuit for pre-season testing ahead of the 2023 F1 season. It didn’t take long for two things to become clear. Red Bull took the lead. The RB19 has already been tuned and, as the season shows, this car will be the main package throughout the 2023 campaign.

The second?

Aston Martin was also preparing something.

In hindsight, that wasn’t surprising. After all, Aston Martin’s challenger for the 2023 season, the AMR23 was…you guessed it, the first design under new technical director Dan Fallows, who joined the team from Red Bull. Fallows oversaw an “aggressive” vision for the AMR23, resulting in many, including Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, saying that when Fernando Alonso finished on the podium early in the season alongside two RB19s, He said he had an “aggressive” vision. 3 Red Bulls on the podium.

In fact, Aston Martin started at the front a year ago. Alonso and teammate Lance Stroll both scored points at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, with Alonso on the podium as the team headed to Saudi Arabia. Constructors’ 2nd placeStandings table. They remained in second place after the season’s fourth race, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, and went into Monaco believing that Alonso might finally capture his elusive 33rd Grand Prix victory.

But that wasn’t the case. Alonso finished second, and with a double points finish from Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, Mercedes moved to second place in the constructors’ standings, just one point behind Aston Martin. After the British Grand Prix, Mercedes pulled away from Aston Martin, with Ferrari soon to follow. In the end, Aston Martin was forced to look into McLaren’s papaya orange-filled rearview mirror instead of looking up at a table of Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes.

In the end, McLaren overtook them, and Aston Martin I had to settle for 5th place.. It’s certainly an improvement from his seventh-place finish in 2022, but looking back he may wonder if he could have done more.

2023 Highlights: Australian Grand Prix

As outlined in our previous Alpine article, the 2023 Australian Grand Prix was a chaotic affair, with Alpine duo Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly colliding on a late restart, leaving both out of the points. . A bitter end to a long day.

Things were much better on the Aston Martin side of the pit lane. Both drivers survived crashes late in the lap to score points, giving the team its best result of the entire season.

For Alonso, he started the season with his third consecutive P3 finish, the third coming in Australia.

However, Stroll finished just behind him, bouncing back from a pointless finish in Saudi Arabia to finish 4th. This would go down as his best performance throughout the entire 2023 campaign.

“This sport can be a rollercoaster of emotions at times. Overall, the team was able to emerge from a chaotic race with solid points and finished second in the Constructors’ Championship after three races. That’s a very positive thing.” Stroll said after the race:.

2023 Lowlight: Singapore Grand Prix

On the other side of the Aston Martin ledger from a year ago?

Singapore.

As the week drew to a close, teams were forced to view the Singapore Grand Prix simply as a ‘Grand Prix’.test” Weekend. Stroll was eliminated from Q1 due to a heavy crash during qualifying and was unable to participate in the Singapore Grand Prix.

As for Alonso, he advanced to Q3 and started the race in seventh place, but said that in the race “everything that could go wrong went wrong”. Alonso took notice after the Grand Prix. He was penalized for crossing the pit line and endured a very slow pit stop in the second half of the race, returning to contention in last place.

He finished in 15th place.

“It’s been a really tough few days for the team in Singapore,” team principal Mike Clack said at the time. “Although we only raced one car today, we are looking forward to seeing Lance back in Japan. During the pit stop, the rear jack did not work properly and during the virtual safety car Fernando’s The race has been canceled. We need to analyze exactly what happened.

“Even without this issue, it would have been difficult to score points today. We will learn from these difficult days and move forward.”

Outlook for 2024:

There’s one word being thrown around Aston Martin ahead of the 2024 F1 season:

development.

As mentioned above, the team started the year with AMR23. However, as the season progressed, the team struggled to upgrade his AMR23 and began to focus on the 2024 campaign. They used certain races as glorified test sessions to begin honing their vision for the AMR24.

“I think it’s no secret that we took a pragmatic approach at the end of last season,” Fallows said. Media after AMR24 release. “We wanted to take every opportunity to really learn the lessons we needed to learn with AMR23.”

The team is hopeful that the decisions it makes in 2023 will pay off in big ways, not just at the beginning of 2024, but throughout the entire season.

“We recognized that we needed to do something that would be a lesson for 2024 and we did that. And we achieved a good performance towards the end of the season and got a podium in Brazil. And I think we can overcome it. [fifth] place [in the championship]That was a great result for us, and I think that was a really important part for us, coming out of that and obviously carrying that momentum into this year. ” Add fallow land. “Going through that process and being able to continue that momentum into ’24, I think it gives us a lot of confidence going into this season.”

Development is a key challenge facing Aston Martin this year. They started 2023 well, but stalled midway through. If he can keep pace with his rivals by upgrading to the AMR24 throughout 2024, he might be able to keep pace with them on the track.

“We’re very pleased with the steps we’ve made over the winter,” Fallows said. “I think we were able to take last year’s car a step forward and that was what we wanted. But the reality is, the off-season is short. And we developed things that were relevant for this year quite late in last season. So our main objective is to make sure that this car is a good platform to make those developments during the season.

“We have seen, especially last season, but also the season before that, that the in-season development race is very intense, and we are confident that we will be as competitive as we are going into the new season. So what we’ve really focused on is making sure we have a good, stable foundation from which to continue to develop and update the car and keep it performing. ”

John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

Person under the most pressure to perform in 2024: Lance Stroll

Stroll is undoubtedly under the most performance pressure at Aston Martin.

Aston Martin finished the year with 280 points, 206 of which went to Alonso. The veteran driver accounted for 74% of the team points and was third on the grid last year. (Alex Albon accounted for 27 of Williams’ 28 pre-season goals, giving them a scoring rate of 96%; Nico Hulkenberg scored 9 of Haas’ 12 goals, giving them a scoring rate of 75%) recorded).

Development is certainly a key issue for Aston Martin this season. But they will need to get more from Stroll in 2024 if they really want to fight for a spot on the grid.

2024 Aston Martin lineup

Team representative: mike crack
driver: Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll
challenger: AMR24