Aston Martin Poised To “Catch Up Pretty Soon” – Alonso

As Aston Martin launched their new car for the 2025 Formula 1 season, driver Fernando Alonso has expressed confidence in the team’s progress and potential for improvement. Despite a challenging 2024 campaign, where Aston Martin finished fifth in the constructors’ standings for the second consecutive year, the Spanish two-time world champion believes the team is starting the new season “in a much better place.”

Alonso attributes this optimism to the team’s efforts in understanding and addressing the shortcomings of the previous seasons. “We did learn a lot last year, the second part of the season [there were] a lot of experiments going on in the way of learning more things in the 2025 car,” he said. “The simulator has been updated so we have been working a lot in the sim to develop the car a little bit more precisely than the last few seasons.”

The veteran driver also highlighted the team’s new tools, organization, and personnel as key factors in tackling the weaknesses identified in 2024. “We have new tools, new organisation, new people in place to tackle some of the weaknesses we identified last year, so we start in a much better place,” Alonso stated.

Aston Martin’s new team principal and chief executive officer, Andy Cowell, revealed that the car’s aerodynamic package is “close to 100% new,” a result of the team pushing their design work “later than ever before” to maximize development time in the wind tunnel. This approach, Cowell believes, will yield positive results on the track and improve the correlation between the team’s development work and on-track performance, an area where Aston Martin struggled in previous seasons.

Cowell also praised Alonso’s contributions to the team, highlighting his phenomenal work rate, performance drive, and valuable feedback. “Fernando’s experiences and feedback are amazing. His feedback from the simulator, exceptionally good feedback in every session, amazing. And also his prioritisation,” Cowell said. “We’re all guilty, aren’t we, of coming up with a list of 12 things that we’d like to improve? It’s a strength, if you can bring that down to three priorities that really, really matter. And Fernando is very good at that.”