The build-up to Aston Martin’s big re-entry into Formula 1 contained a lot of grandeur but even a breakthrough result in Monaco cannot disguise the fact the team has underperformed so far against its initial expectations.
A couple of days before the Monaco Grand Prix, where a double-points finish for Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll would vault Aston Martin from seventh to fifth in the constructors’ championship, F1 team principal and CEO Otmar Szafnauer admitted: “there’s always pressure when you’re not achieving what you thought you’re gonna achieve”.
And that’s the situation Aston Martin finds itself in. So pressure is inevitable.
Though the 2021 floor changes have been routinely blamed for its slump from being a race winner last season to struggling to score points a few months later and they genuinely can be considered a legitimate mitigating factor, it doesn’t change the fact that this is not what team chairman Lawrence Stroll and his fellow investors expected in the short-term.
Aston Martin’s hopes of fighting for third in the constructors’ championship are already all-but-extinguished. Szafnauer has admitted that is “probably a step too far”.
“Nobody wants to go into a season anticipating to be top of the midfield or fighting for third, and then ending up at the bottom of the midfield,” said Szafnauer in Monaco.
“We’ve got to fight hard to get our way out of it. But we’re all realistic that this is the end of these regulations as we know them.
“We are focusing all our efforts on next year, to make sure that we come out of the blocks where we want to be.”
Aston’s ambition is to be in the top half of the championship by the end of the year, a position the team moved into immediately courtesy of its Monaco haul, which almost quadrupled its 2021 points tally in one race.
But given the team spent last year fighting McLaren for third in the championship and now has less than a quarter of McLaren’s points after five races, the gulf between the two teams is clear.
So sneaking into fifth will probably not look like much of a consolation for the likes of Stroll and his fellow investors.
That’s underlined when this season is put into the context of the team’s recent history. For all the investment and all the hype that’s come with the Aston Martin image, the team has regressed to the sort of performance seen in its leaner years as Force India.
With a boss like Stroll, so used to winning and with such a clear plan in mind, it may be that Szafnauer is feeling the squeeze more than most.
It took just two race weekends for him to start facing questions about his future – with one line of questioning focusing on an alleged hiring of a head-hunter to suss out a new CEO for the F1 team…
So, Szafnauer’s call for the team to remain “realistic” and avoid compromising development for the major technical overhaul coming in 2022 by chasing too much of a 2021 reprieve is an instruction to his staff, but it could also be interpreted as the argument for him still being trusted to lead this project longer-term.
“We’ve got to be realistic as to what we can do with a frozen car, a frozen rake, and regulations that are significantly – if not completely – changing for 2022,” said Szafnauer.
“So, we just have to be realistic to understand the situation we’re in and do the best we can with the car and the tools that we have.
“There’s always pressure when you’re not achieving where you thought you’re gonna achieve. But we all have to be realistic and do what we can, without compromising the 2022 programme.”
The most important thing for Aston Martin is that this disappointing early spell doesn’t cause any knee-jerk reactions. F1’s floor changes may well make 2021 a special case, as the impact of the new rules on the low-rake Mercedes and Aston Martin cars has clearly hurt their form and that situation will not apply for 2022 and beyond.
In that sense, Aston Martin’s long-term vision remains unaffected. And light relief may be found in the short-term if the team and star signing Vettel can build on his fifth place in Monaco.
But the main focus is not on trying to spark a stunning in-season turnaround, it’s to make sure Aston Martin doesn’t lose sight of the bigger picture and maximises the huge change in technical regulations coming for 2022.
Dropping the complaint about the process behind the 2021 floor changes, as detailed here, is almost certainly beneficial to that process too, as prolonging the issue could have distracted the team from its 2021 damage limitation job and its 2022 preparations. Many believed that the saga was putting the focus in the wrong place, and not necessarily Szafnauer’s chief concern either.
The 2021 season has been disappointing so far, regardless of the brief Monaco reprieve, and Stroll and his associates don’t like losing. But the sensible thing is to move on and allow the team to carry out a long-term vision free of any interference.
Without the major variable of the floor changes, Aston Martin’s underperformance so far would be piling pressure on the likes of Szafnauer.
The reality is that variable exists and is an obvious factor in the performance pecking order.
Turning Aston Martin into a title challenger was always a multi-year project. It would be unwise to believe the structure tasked with that has suddenly become unfit for purpose after just a few months.
