After a rather disappointing start to the season, Aston Martin decided to carry out a major facelift to its AMR22 for the Spanish Grand Prix weekend.
His move, adopting the same concept as Red Bull, has triggered a huge wave of controversy and was even investigated by the FIA due to a possible illegal copy, but was finally given the go-ahead.
However, any hopes for the Silverstone team to make a leap forward in terms of pace were dashed in qualifying as neither Sebastian Vettel nor his team-mate Lance Stroll made it past Q1.
The German driver, who had intended to fight for Q3, had to struggle to find a good balance and could not get past 16th place, while the Canadian only managed to beat the two Williams.
However, despite Vettel sounding surprised via team radio after crashing out in Q1, he believes Aston Martin ‘s current management is the right one.
“If you look at the [time] table, it’s not that different, but we already knew it wasn’t going to be a big step forward right away,” said the German.
“But we believe in this concept. And we’re sure there’s more to come. It’s very early days, it’s basically a completely new car, so everything is different.”
“I’m still getting to know it. I had a good feeling, but in qualifying I was slowed down by, shall we say, the poor balance of the car in terms of having to fight to feel the rear end, it moved too much.
“I just couldn’t match the speed that I had in practice, or what I thought I could match in qualifying.”
Vettel explained that both he and Aston Martin just need more time to better understand the car and what it needs to extract more pace.
He also suggested that this weekend’s temperature at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, higher than expected, did not help too much.
“We started from a blank page,” he said. “We basically premiered the car yesterday [Friday], it’s very different to what we had before. I’m sure this is the way to go.”
“I mean, I know the start hasn’t been great, but I knew it was going to be tough. I saw nobody was really that far apart in terms of lap time, so yeah, part of it surprised me too because I was expecting a better result today. , around tenth place,” he concluded.
