Needing to react when their porpoising AMR22 broke floors, Lance Stroll has applauded Aston Martin’s ability to “dig ourselves out of the hole.”
Aston Martin failed to score a single point in the first three races of the 2022 championship, Stroll revealing they had to raise the car’s ride-height, a decision that cost them performance, as they kept breaking the floors.
“The lower you run these cars the better they are downforce, but then there’s this porpoising,” Stroll told the media including PlanetF1.com.
“Generally, we’ve been limited with the floor just breaking so we have to watch how much we porpoise for those reasons.”
Six races into the season they already had a solution in place, debuting a revised AMR22 that would go onto record 12 points scoring results.
Aston Martin finished the championship in seventh place, outscoring the bottom five teams in the second half of the season.
“I think the team has evolved a lot,” Stroll told Motorsport.com.
“At the factory, with the way that things are done, and how the car’s developed, I think a couple of years ago, we would have been in a much more difficult position to dig ourselves out of the hole that we were in at the beginning of the year.
“Now, I think big changes were made. We had a fully different car in Barcelona, and then upgraded from there. Then, all of a sudden, we find ourselves in some races in a much better position than before.
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“I don’t think that we would have been in that position a couple of years ago, to dig ourselves out of that hole. So, I think in that sense, we’ve made huge progress.
“The whole approach as a team, we’re bonding much better than we used to in the past.
“I think we’re integrating much better than in the past. And I think back at the factory, the whole work ethic, communication, the way that everything is done, I think we’ve come a long way from where we were as Racing Point.”
The driver believes Aston Martin’s recovery was a “big step” for them.
“We became much more competitive during the season,” he continued, “and we put ourselves in a position at many races to fight for points and challenging to get into Q3, and all those things where we were just not even close to that at the beginning of the year.
“In that regard, it’s been really positive. But we still have those odd races, like, going from Austin to Mexico, one week later, where we were probably the fourth-fastest team, I would say in Texas before we had all our issues, to the ninth/tenth-fastest team in Mexico. And then in Sao Paulo, again, we were somewhere in the middle.
“I think we still have those weekends where we kind of don’t know why we’re not, for whatever reason, as competitive as other weekends. We have ideas but we are not 100 percent sure.
“I think that, going forward, that has to be the target: to be more competitive more often at different kinds of tracks: high efficiency, low downforce, high downforce. I guess that’s the focus.
“But when I look at where we came from at the beginning of the year, I think it’s been a big step in the right direction.”
This season Stroll has a new team-mate onboard, Aston Martin quick to snap up Fernando Alonso after Sebastian Vettel announced his retirement.
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https://formulaone.news/aston-martin/unfinished-business-in-f1-never-say-never-says-vandoorne
