Fernando Alonso said he feels confident that Aston Martin learned from its mistakes in 2023 and won’t repeat the same development errors in the upcoming season.
Last year, the British outfit started very strong, but toward the half of the season, it struggled to keep up with its great form as the updates on the car weren’t working as expected.
Ahead of 2024, Alonso believes that the team did great work during winter and found the right direction to follow and improve a competitive car even more.
“I’m confident,” he said. “If not, I could not maybe sleep for the last two months! But I think we did a lot of experiments and a lot of changes back and forth in terms of understanding the problems and the direction and the paths that we need to follow this year on the car.
“I think we understood a lot of things, and with this year’s car we intend to improve some of those weaknesses that we saw in terms of developing the car last year that we maybe got into the wrong direction a few times, and we understood a bit too late.
“Hopefully we have that knowledge, those difficulties from last year were lessons that we took on board for the ’24 car, and we will see the result.
“I think we had a good step forward this winter, maybe not as big as last year, because last year the baseline was very poor. And this year, the baseline was very strong already last year’s, which is understandable.”
Alonso continued by underlining the weaknesses of last year’s challenger, saying that he would like a better car in the high-speed corners and a faster one on the straights.
“I basically will love to have a little bit more downforce,” he said. “Especially on the high-speed corners, probably it was one weak area last year, that I think we tried to improve in this year’s car.
“Top speed was not the best last year; we were always fighting on the straights. And we were at the bottom of the charts on the top speed. So we tried to be a bit more efficient this year, a little bit faster on the straight.
“So there are a couple of points that I would love to see in the car when we hit Bahrain winter testing, which probably will help us on Sundays on the race weekends.”