Aston Martin ‘will be in better shape in a couple of races’

Aston Martin will improve their car performance in “a couple of races” time once they bring upgrades to their car, says team principal Mika Krack.

The team endured a difficult start to the season, scoring their first points of the year only in the fourth race at Imola.

Krack expects the team will improve their performance over the coming rounds once they introduce upgrades to the AMR22 and better understand how they work with their car.

“I think in a couple of races we will be in better shape,” Krack said. “It would be foolish to say in ‘race X’ or ‘race Y’, because even if you bring new parts on, you always need to understand them and you need to understand what job you have done.

“Say, for example, we bring a big package for Miami and we know there is rain or whatever and we don’t make it work. You create a lot of expectations and then everybody will consider you have failed.

“Take the sprint [in Imola] – we have only one session on Friday, you bring a big update and you have no chance at all to test it or to consolidate if it works or not. So from that point of view, I think it’s very important not to say a specific event, especially to the outside world.

“We have our internal plans, you will understand that I don’t want to go into detail there, but I think in a couple of races we should be in better shape.”

There are three key areas of development that the team are focusing their efforts on with the AMR22, says Krack.

“One is aero, the most important one,” Krack said. “Second one is car weight, very important as well.

“The third one is how can we provide better feedback to our driver. That goes with different inputs into the suspension, it goes to the steering and these kind of things, the vertical and the whole set-up of the car. So we need to try and give the driver a better feel for the car so that they can extract more from it.”

The difficulty that drivers Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll appear to have had in getting to grips with the handling of these new ground effect cars for 2022 is partly due to the limited mechanical feedback they are receiving from the car, Krack says.

“This is also why I think we had so many incidents at various tracks like, for example, in Melbourne, when our drivers went off quite a lot,” Krack explained.

“This is not normal – drivers of this quality don’t go off all the time. So I think we made a small step here already by some small updates, and we’re looking forward to doing more.”

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