Aston Martin is yet to equal the performance peak the team enjoyed during its previous incarnation, its former chief operating officer has stated.
Otmar Szafnauer joined the team in October 2009, when it was known as Force India and owned by Vijay Mallya. The team went into administration in 2018 and was purchased by Lawrence Stroll. Szafnauer remained in charge of its day-to-day running until its first season under the Aston Martin name, then left at the beginning of 2022.
He said Stroll plays a more active role in the management of the team than Mallya, partly as a result of appointing his son Lance as one of its drivers.
“The significant differences are, Vijay was hands-off – Vijay didn’t have a son in the car either,” Szafnauer told Inside Line. “So because of it, there’s less emotion and more objective decision-making.”
However he said both owners similar aims for the team. “Both of them wanted the best on-track performance possible. They both had that drive – ‘we want better, we want better, we want better’. So I experienced that from both parties.
“Lawrence actually spent a lot more money in being able to get that performance. It’s not that Vijay didn’t [spend], but Lawrence spent an order of magnitude more. Ironically, the performance at the end of Force India was better than they’re performing today.”
Force India took fourth in the 2016 constructors’ championship and repeated the result the following year. In 2018 they fell to seventh, but had to forfeit 59 points when they changed identity mid-season due to the team’s sale, without which they would have been fifth.
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Following Stroll’s takeover, competing as Racing Point, they came seventh again in 2019 with a car which saw little development. But in 2020 they returned to fourth place and scored their first win. Had they not been penalised 15 points for a technical regulations infringement, they would have beaten McLaren to third place.
Under Stroll, the team has invested heavily in upgrading its infrastructure, building a state-of-the-art new factory at its Silverstone site which it opened last year. Szafnauer pointed out the challenges of delivering those changes while maintaining competitiveness.
“My fear was, with all the change coming, how do we make sure that it doesn’t have a big impact on track performance?” he said. “And I don’t know the answer to that. We’ll see in the future.
“But after Aston Martin embarked on new factories and new management, I think they were seventh and fifth now. We’ll see what next year brings.
“But when I was there under Racing Point, we were fourth. The year of administration we were seventh only because we had all of our points taken away, we really should have been fourth that year. The following year we were seventh and then back up to fourth again. And then since then it’s been seventh [in 2021 and 2022] and fifth [in 2023]. Not as good as Force India at the end.”
Aston Martin scored 280 points last year, 95 more than its best under its previous two identities, albeit over five more rounds including six points-paying sprint races. They claimed eight grand prix podium finishes over the season, all courtesy of Fernando Alonso, more than they managed under their previous two identities.
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Szafnauer described how the team has focused on raising the performance of Lance Stroll, who contributed just one-quarter of their points last year, including by pairing him with multiple champions Sebastian Vettel and Alonso.
“The engineers working closely with Lance have to be sometimes brutally honest to be able to extract the best performance,” he said. “There are other people within the team too that help, the physiotherapist and sports psychologist and the usual entourage that everybody has or the drivers have to make sure that they’re working at the highest level.
“There’s also hiring world champions to sit alongside Lance in order for him to be able to see what world champions do and how they go about their business to be able to emulate that. So all those things, they’re in place and I think because of it they’re going to be better off.”
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