Sebastian Vettel had two crashes over the weekend in Melbourne , one in FP3 and one during the race, while his team-mate Lance Stroll also had an incident in FP3 and was involved in an unexplained crash with Nicholas Latifi in Q1.
Following the race, the team completed an inventory of the bodywork components, and calculated what they will need to do now to have a decent stock of current spec parts for the upcoming Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
As a result, the team’s production resources will have to focus on damaged parts, rather than creating new specification items for Imola , although they are still confident that they will be able to carry some of the planned upgrades to the car.
“We’ve had a very difficult weekend because we’ve had a lot of car damage,” said Mike Krack, director of Aston Martin. “It all started on Friday, when we suffered a small problem in the power unit, which we had to change.
“So we didn’t have a lot of time. And then obviously the on-track incidents that were visible to everyone and cost us a lot of time to work on.”
“I think when we got to Melbourne we thought we were going to be a little bit better. But obviously we couldn’t show that over the weekend, because we had a lot more problems than you can afford in one grand prix.
“However, I think during the race we were still in a position where we saw that we had a real chance of scoring points, but it didn’t happen in the end. Overall, quite a disappointing weekend, really.”
“So now we have to collect all the parts that we have, as we are starting to run out of parts. So it is something that we have to solve.”
Asked if the Melbourne damage would compromise plans to upgrade the current AMR22, Krack admitted that it might.
“I’m pretty sure you’ve counted the number of incidents and the number of wings and front suspensions we’ve damaged. So you can quickly calculate how many we’ll need to go to Imola , and actually yes, the answer is yes.”
“Will we have the capacity to develop [new parts], or will we need to use our capacity to make spare parts? These discussions are ongoing right now,” Krack explained.
