New Aston Martin F1 season target for 2023 speaks volumes about their drop-off
Mike Krack is targeting "fourth or fifth position" in the constructors' standings for his Aston Martin team.
The Silverstone-based squad currently sits in third place with 196 points from the first 12 race weekends. But the lion's share of those came in the first half-a-dozen rounds as they made an excellent start to the season.
Fernando Alonso scored five podiums in the first six races, but has managed only one more since with his team less competitive in comparison to their rivals. Mercedes have since leapfrogged them into second place, McLaren have made impressive strides and Ferrari can perhaps claim to have the slightly better car right now as well.
Just 21 points from their last three outings have seen Aston Martin lose ground to all those teams in the fight to be best of the rest behind Red Bull. The improvement from last season remains evident, but team principal Krack seems to have admitted that a fairytale run at second place might be out of reach.
"While we have made substantial progress on our AMR23, we are also depending on the progress of our competitors," he told AvaTrade. "We developed our car last year in a very good way and by the end of the season we could challenge fourth and fifth position.
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"We want to progress step by step and if, by the end of the year, we are further ahead in the championship than we were last year it will have been a good year and shows we are on the right path to be at the front."
That more conservative target, compared to their current position of third in the standings, hints that Krack believes it will be difficult for his team to beat the likes of Mercedes and McLaren on a consistent basis. And it comes after the Luxembourger declared he would not be pushing the panic button despite the points drying up.
He said: " You must avoid bringing upgrades for the sake of bringing upgrades because that is very easy. Then you burn precious cost cap money, so it is important that you understand what you are doing before you do it and it is credit to a lot of good people that we have an option to wait an event more rather than just throwing [upgrades].
"The magic bullet? I wish I could confirm that. We have a development plan, and it was based on continuously developing the car and we will follow that. Obviously, you need to see what directions you will take, depending on what happens, but all in all, we have this development race."
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