After the worst start to a Formula 1 season since his rookie campaign in 2001, the smile is back on Fernando Alonso's face in 2025.
But that is little to do with him finally getting some points on the scoreboard at race nine in Spain, nor adding to his tally at the Canadian Grand Prix last weekend.
Instead, it's down to the car he now has underneath him. Having struggled with the balance in the early stages of 2025, an upgrade Aston Martin brought to Imola in mid-May has made all the difference.
The changes, which included a new floor and diffuser plus sidepod revisions, were the first proper developments added to the AMR25 since the campaign kicked off.
And while they were never expected to deliver a dramatic leap forward in pace, they did unlock one key characteristic the team was chasing: allowing the drivers to feel more at one with how the car handles.
Having now had time to bed things in, Alonso has openly talked about how much more confident he is with the AMR25, which is what has triggered his uptick in results.
"It seems that I'm able to push the car to the limit now in the last few races since Imola," he said in Canada.
"With the new package, I'm much more linked with the car. I feel the car and I can push to the maximum. I feel in a good moment."
But the feeling's not shared
But while Aston Martin certainly welcomes the fact that Alonso is in a happier place, it has not gone amiss that team-mate Lance Stroll remains a bit lost.
The Canadian, who missed the Spanish GP because of wrist problems, has not finished in the points since he was classified fifth in the Miami GP sprint at the start of May, and has got through to Q3 just once this campaign, at Imola.
Speaking after his home race last weekend, where he finished a lowly 17th and incurred an in-race penalty for pushing Pierre Gasly onto the grass at high speed, Stroll seemed particularly downbeat - a notable contrast to how his team-mate assessed things.
"I don't really feel any difference in the car," said Stroll, when asked by The Race if he shared Alonso's review of the upgraded car.
"Maybe he's just been getting good results and he feels good in the car because of that, but, I don't know. I felt pretty slow."
Aston Martin does not have an obvious answer for why there is this disparity in feeling between its drivers. But it is clear that in the super-tight midfield fight, details count for a lot.
Qualifying in Canada highlighted the margins at play. Stroll had looked quick in Q1, getting himself up to second at one point on the soft tyre and looking comfortably able to stick it in the top 10.
But a switch to what Aston Martin felt was the quicker medium tyre was initially compromised when Alex Albon's broken engine cover triggered a red flag, meaning Stroll hadn't completed a first run on them with just five minutes remaining.
After that, Stroll got squeezed in the need to rush two preparation laps and a minor improvement only on his final lap meant he did not get through to Q2. Starting 18th, it was always going to be tough to move forward.
Asked about the varying form and feedback from both drivers, team principal Andy Cowell suggested that things looked worse between the cars than they really were.
"The set-ups are a little bit different now, but not tremendously so," he said.
"We saw in the beginning of Q1 Lance on that first soft was right up there. And so I think it is just the choice from us of having a soft and then a medium in Q1 before the red flag scuppered the opportunity for him to put a quick time in.
"If the bodywork hadn't blown off of Albon’s Williams, I think we'd have seen both of them in Q3."
But from Stroll's perspective, while not nailing qualifying strategies is hurting - he said "100% that was where the weekend all fell apart" in Canada - equally he sensed wider issues at play that he felt cannot be cured in the short term.
"I know we're slow and I have a good feeling that it's going to be case again in Austria because the car has some characteristics that never change and there's problems, limitations, that I feel that never change," he said.
"So it's probably just going to be the same again and again and again."
The next steps
Aston Martin is considering a second upgrade step though, which may help resolve some of Stroll's issues.
But even without that, Cowell felt the team had hit a good virtuous circle with Alonso: where more downforce gives the driver more confidence, which allows the team to make better set-up choices.
"Having more load in all corner types helps," added Cowell. "It's then less of a distraction when it comes to what bits to put on the car for FP1, what bits to do experiments with through FP1 and FP2.
"And then you are into refinement on the final order things, which is how a race weekend should be. That then means that there's greater analysis done on those fine order bits, and the drivers can dial it in better."
A lingering weakness
But that's not to stay it is all onwards and upwards for Aston Martin (or at least one of its drivers).
The AMR25 remains a tricky car in the race, with its tyre degradation worse than some of its closest rivals.
Alonso neatly summed it up: "Sunday pace is not quite yet in the rhythm of the weekend. We are sometimes one or two tenths away from the top teams in qualifying, and then we are one minute away in the race.
"So definitely Sunday is still our weak point on the weekend, and we need to make some, maybe set-up work or priority into Sunday for the next few races."
What Aston Martin needs to work out is the best way to make its Sundays better without compromising its Saturdays so much that it cannot make use of a better race car; there is no point having the least tyre degradation in the field if you are starting at the back.
Cowell added: "That is something that we were all looking at after the previous few races, where we can see that we're qualifying better, but we're not picking points up.
"At the end of the day, what we're after is chasing championship points. So we have to look at the way we set the car up for the race, and we have to think about tyre allocation for [both] qualifying and for the race."
