Alonso hopes Aston 'back to normal' after recent slump
Fernando Alonso was of the opinion that Aston Martin's performance at last week's British Grand Prix at Silverstone was a sign that things were back to normal for the team after a recent difficult spell.
The team had scored points in each of the first six rounds of 2024. But a big upgrade introduced for the Emilia Romagna GP at Imola made the AMR24 more of a handful, and the team recorded its first DNF the following week at Monaco.
Aston Martin subsequently failed to finish in the points in either Spain or Austria, and have now fallen a long way back from the top four in the constructors standings at the halfway point of the season.
But the team was on better form in the most recent race, with both Alonso and his team mate Lance Stroll both making it through to the final round of qualifying and going on to finish in P8 and P7 respectively.
Alonso said this showed the team was heading in the right direction again after introducing a new front wing at Silverstone together with modifications to the aerodynamics around the car's rear brake ducts.
"It was pretty good," Alonso told the media during the weekend. "The feeling was back to normality. We were the fifth, sixth fastest team."
"Seventh and eighth, I think that's more or less the positions we were in pre-Imola," he suggested. We came back to our more natural position, so I'm happy for that."
Both Astons did finish behind Nico Hulkenberg who was having a brilliant time for Haas at Silverstone. "Nico I think was very fast the whole weekend, but we could fight for points," said Alonso.
As I said, we're happy to be back in the points and it felt more competitive," he continued. "After Austria we regrouped a little bit, we understood a couple of directions that maybe were not right.
"It has been better," he acknowledged, admitting that the team needed to prove itself with new upgrades planned for the next two races in Hungary and Belgium before the F1 summer shutdown.
"We've been bringing in a lot of new parts to the car, and some of them they work, some of them they didn't," he said. "Hopefully in Hungary we have a positive surprise.
"We need to prove it," he said of the importance of not over-promising and underdelivering in case the same problems that befell them after Imola recur once again. "We need to not talk and deliver the results."
Alonso's boss, team principal Mike Krack, was less bullish about Aston's improved form at Silverstone in case it was down to the cooler, wetter conditions last week which had also worked to their favour in Canada.
"It wasn't a normal race with the wet in between so we need to have a look. The ranking is better than the previous two, we don't have to be blind to see that, but we have to analyse if the performance is better.
"In Austria it was 50-60C track temperature, the softest tyres, on a track that has either very high-speed or very low-speed [corners]," he pointed out. "You come [to Silverstone], it's very cold, you have the hardest tyres.
"I think these are the effects that you have to isolate and separate, so that you don't get lost in just being driven by the ranking and the position".
"I think we need to be careful comparing these races," he added. "We need to see the effect of [the upgrades] and then decide how we move on."
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