Dan Fallows says the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team still have a fair way to go to catch up and compete with Oracle Red Bull Racing and fight for overall race victories.
Aston Martin have started the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season strongly, with Fernando Alonso scoring podium finishes in four of the opening five events of the year, the only exception being the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
However, Red Bull have been the dominant team across those opening events, with the wins shared between Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez, and it is this domination that means Aston Martin have a lot of work to do to be genuine race win contenders.
“We do we need to sort of consider where we are relative to the Red Bull,” Aston Martin Technical Director Fallows is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “But I think there are areas we believe where we’re relatively strong.
“Also, we have to optimise our car for every particular circuit, which means that sometimes there may be aspects of whether it’s low-speed, high-speed corners, which aren’t quite as strong as some other competitors.
“The Red Bull as a concept has been evolved for a bit longer than ours. We obviously very publicly went to a different concept early last year. We are still developing that.
“We think we’ve made a very big step this year, but we still have a little way to go. And I think honestly, I wouldn’t point to sort of one single area of it. I think we just need to improve everything, really.”
One of the positives to come from the 2023 season so far for Aston Martin is that the car appears to be good on all types of circuit and has very few shortfalls.
“It’s not necessarily that I think our car has particular strengths in some areas,” Fallows added. “I think we have managed to generate a car which is reasonably capable in a lot of different areas. We can tune it to what we believe is the optimum for that particular track.
“There are certainly areas that we are focused from an aerodynamic and mechanical point of view that we think we can make progress. But honestly, I don’t look at it as a car that has any significant weaknesses at the moment.
“It’s just that we want to kind of build on the speed that we have and keep going with the same philosophy.”
Fallows would ‘love’ to see Aston Martin fight for a race win or two this season, and he feels there are a few tracks on the calendar where they could be in the fight against Red Bull.
“I’d love to say that a win is possible this season,” Fallows said. “There are obviously some circuits where it’s not the normal run of play necessarily, sometimes cars have particular characteristics that can play out. For example in Monaco, tracks like that.
“But honestly, I think we’re realistic about our situation, where we are at the moment, our focus is really on just maximising the amount of performance we get on the car in the shortest possible time. And we’ll see what kind of rewards that brings.”