The fastest Aston Martin lap recorded in Sprint Qualifying was slower than the slowest Formula 2 car in the category qualifying session in Miami. The team, together with Honda, is currently focusing exclusively on reliability development rather than performance gains.
Who was the fastest Aston Martin driver seen yesterday in Miami? It was Mari Boya, who finished sixteenth in Formula 2 qualifying with a time of 1’40”554. Fernando Alonso, who ended up twenty-first in SQ1 with only one flying lap completed, stopped the clock at 1’41”311. The joke was circulating in the Miami paddock last night, as those working in the sport can be extremely cynical, but the Aston Martin disaster is a very real situation. It is true that Alonso had his lap time of 1’32”490 deleted for exceeding track limits, but it changes little: even with that time, he would have remained in twenty-first position on the grid for today’s Sprint Race.
Fernando Alonso, in a more “gentleman-like” tone, still managed to find a small positive point at the end of a disastrous day. “The vibrations have decreased, the changes made after the Suzuka weekend have worked. But unfortunately, the performance has not improved: our rivals have made progress, while we have focused on reliability. We have to accept it, our programme this year is a bit different from the others and we need to stay calm,” said the two-time Formula 1 world champion.
As unbelievable as it may seem, things went even worse for Lance Stroll: zero timed laps completed across the entire day. “A difficult Friday,” he commented. “I was hoping to get a couple of proper laps in during Sprint Qualifying, but unfortunately I had a front wheel lock-up and I was unable to set any time. We need to analyse the situation and understand why both cars had this issue. We have a lot to go through and work on overnight for tomorrow. Let’s see what we can learn.”
Aston Martin now appears destined to face a season without any real sporting targets or competitive milestones. The current objectives are more like a long checklist of problems that the team must try to tick off, using race weekends effectively as extended test sessions rather than pure competition events. On top of the early-season difficulties, a growing preparation deficit has emerged due to a lack of mileage. While rival teams are continuously running laps, developing their cars and identifying performance gains, the Aston Martin garage has seen very limited running, with laps counted almost on one hand due to serious reliability issues that are heavily disrupting the programme.
In this context, talking about long-term planning makes very little sense at the moment. If Fernando Alonso is offered the chance to remain for one final season and decides to accept, the team would not need to worry about the driver market. However, if that does not happen, another major challenge would immediately arise: finding a suitable replacement. If the target is to sign a driver with a strong winning pedigree, it will not be easy to convince anyone to join a project that currently presents such evident risks and structural uncertainty.
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