Aston Martin set huge Red Bull challenge as improvement demanded

22 December 2023 , 13:06

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Mike Krack wants more from Aston Martin despite their improvements in 2023 (Image: Getty Images)

Aston Martin chiefs Mike Krack and Tom McCullough will not be satisfied until their team is as ruthlessly efficient as Red Bull were in their extraordinary 2023 Formula 1 title-winning season.

Red Bull romped to the title virtually unchallenged as they and star driver Max Verstappen smashed a swathe of single-season records in the process. Not only was their RB19 car the class of the field, but the Dutchman consistently got the very best out of his machine.

Fernando Alonso did similar with his AMR23, for the most part. But, though Aston Martin began the season as the surprise package with a very competitive car, they lost the development race over the course of the campaign and slipped from second to fifth.

Performance director McCullough knows where the biggest improvements need to be made. "The team has generally executed weekends well, and in the past, we were very well-known for that," he told reporters.

"Now on top of that, we're obviously trying to design and develop a car to go fight at the front, and we had a rear wing in Suzuka with a manufacturing problem where it failed, the power unit, or actually exhaust problem, in Jeddah.

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It is these things that don't happen as a team if we want to fight right at the front and you have got to have perfect weekends, weekend in, weekend out. Another example, by Red Bull, is from the reliability side as well as the operational side.

"That is the standard we've got to get to and it is not just focusing on one area, there a lots of areas where we need small margins just to be better. We know that if we give our drivers good cars, they'll get us good results so that's what we've got to focus on doing."

For team principal Krack, the priorities are "safety, reliability and then operations first". The reason he emphasises the final point is that the Luxembourger knows, from Red Bull's example, that perfection or something close to it is what is required for the top teams to achieve their ambitions in the current era.

He said: "With the operational side, if we do not manage to be at 100 percent, which we must in each session and each event over the whole year, if we do not manage that, we cannot extract the maximum performance, be it the driver, car, set-up or engineer.

"We must guarantee that we have this box ticked and we have failed to do so a couple of occasions this year, but we know we need to have it right."

Daniel Moxon