Fernando Alonso believes Aston Martin will enter the Formula One season in a stronger position after learning from last year’s tough lessons.
The Silverstone-based team, which unveiled its new Mercedes-powered AMR25 car online Sunday ahead of Wednesday’s Bahrain testing, finished fifth for the second consecutive year in 2024.
After double world champion Alonso claimed six podiums in the first eight races of 2023, expectations were high. However, he failed to finish higher than fifth last year, while teammate Lance Stroll’s best result was sixth.
In November, the team made changes, moving technical director Dan Fallows aside and bringing in former Ferrari technical director Enrico Cardile and Red Bull’s title-winning designer Adrian Newey, who will join March 3.
The season starts in Australia on March 16.
"I think we did learn a lot last year. The second part of the season was sort of experiments going on just in the way of learning even more things into the 2025 car," Alonso told reporters.
"The simulator has been updated as well, so we’ve been working a lot in the sim to be able to develop the car a little bit more precisely than in the last few seasons.
"We have new tools. We have new organization. We have new people in place to tackle some of the weaknesses that we for sure identified last year. So I think we start in a much better place.
"We still need to work a lot, for sure. We lost a little bit of time and months last year and we think we will catch up very soon."
Stroll agreed: "There was a lot of experimenting through the course of last year, and I think we learned a lot about why some of the upgrades didn't bring us what we wanted.
"Everything that has gone into the development of this year's car has really taken a lot of the lessons we learned from last year."
Team principal Andy Cowell, who took over from Mike Krack in January, declined to set a time frame for success and said there would be no cutting corners.
He said work had been done to make the new car more stable through corners and more predictable to drive. Cowell also hoped for better correlation, matching the data from the wind tunnel to what the car was doing on track.
A new wind tunnel will soon be operational at Silverstone, giving the team its own facility instead of having to use Mercedes’ wind tunnel.
