EXCLUSIVE: Aston Martin admit critics are right with ‘not delivered’ confession

Team principal Mike Krack has admitted Aston Martin failed to meet their targets during the 2024 F1 season.

Aston Martin finished fifth in the constructors’ championship for the second consecutive season in 2024, but the team managed less than half the points scored the previous campaign.

The Silverstone-based squad made a flying start to 2023 as they emerged from the winter as Red Bull’s closest challengers, with Fernando Alonso claiming six podiums in the first eight races.

But Aston Martin slid backwards and were out-developed by their midfield rivals as the season wore on, and experienced a similar trend last year, collecting no podiums and scoring just 94 points compared to the 280-point haul they obtained across 2023.

Aston Martin’s hugely ambitious owner Lawrence Stroll has publicly stated that he wants his team to compete for the F1 world championship in the coming years.

The Canadian billionaire has invested hundreds of millions in a new factory, which features a state-of-the-art wind tunnel, secured a works engine partnership with Honda from 2026, and made several statement signings headlined by incoming legendary designer Adrian Newey.

But so far, Aston Martin’s on-track performance has not matched their lofty aims.

When asked how he would respond to critics who point to Aston Martin’s underwhelming results, Krack told Crash.net: “I think that they are right. We have not delivered to our ambitions or expectations.

“When you look from the outside, you say since this project started, we finished seventh, seventh, fifth and fifth again. So if you zoom out completely, you say, ‘okay, this is solid progress’.

“When you then start to zoom in to the seasons, you see that we did not achieve all the targets that we wanted. We wanted to get closer to our competitors, which if we had, if we are honest, probably we would have not finished far from fifth but with a completely different perception of the season.

“We should not blind ourselves with the final result. Fifth from the outside is solid. It’s not amazing, but it's also not terrible. It’s not the worst season ever, but compared to our ambitions we have not delivered what we wanted."

Aston Martin putting performance 'under scrutiny' 

Krack continued: “That is something that we have to hold ourselves up to. We have to be honest with ourselves. Formula 1 is all about performance.

“There has been a lot of areas in our team that has improved massively; the speed at which we deliver upgrades, the quality that these parts are coming from, the pit stops, the garage operations, the race strategy - everything has improved substantially.

“But everything is just secondary to car performance, and that is something we really need to do something about.”

Failure to develop their car successfully has been one of the biggest hurdles Aston Martin have faced over the past two seasons.

Dan Fallows, who only joined the team as technical director in 2022, left his role in November in the wake of Aston Martin’s performance slump.

Aston Martin hope the arrivals of Newey and former Ferrari chassis technical director Enrico Cardile will help address this area when they begin work in 2025.

“It is a period that we need to reflect,” Krack said. “It is maybe already for 18 months, because we had similar issues from the middle of [2023]. We cannot brush it off as a one off.

“We have seen now repeatedly in the performance development, we have not been good enough. We have to put this under scrutiny. We do that, we are having a close look because the team has grown quickly.

“You have a historical structure. How are we structured? How we do things? Who talks to who when we do development of performance, and we have to realise that the way we do it is not leading to success. So we have to question that. 

"This is what we are doing at the moment and we need to discuss if there are some changes that we have to make, or if we have to adapt some processes.”