Alonso expects Aston Martin to start F1 season in a better place

Fernando Alonso expects Aston Martin to start the Formula One season in a much better place after learning some hard lessons last year.

The Silverstone-based team, who showed off their new Mercedes-powered AMR25 car online on Sunday before testing in Bahrain starts on Wednesday, finished fifth for the second year running in 2024.

Expectations had been high after double world champion Alonso took six podiums in the first eight races of 2023, but the Spaniard failed to finish higher than fifth last year while team mate Lance Stroll had a best of sixth.

Dan Fallows, who was technical director, was moved aside in November with the team bringing in former Ferrari technical director Enrico Cardile and Red Bull's title-winning designer Adrian Newey, who starts on 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 t 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 bit more precisely than in the past few seasons.

"We have new tools. We have new organisation. We have new people in place to tackle some of the weaknesses we  identified last year. I think we start in a much better place.

"We need to work a lot, for sure. We lost a  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 learnt a lot about why some upgrades didn't bring us what we wanted.

"Everything that has gone into the development of this year's car has  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 timeframe 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 hoped also for better correlation, matching the data from the wind tunnel to what the car was doing on track.

A new wind tunnel will come on stream soon at Silverstone, giving the team their own facility instead of having to use the Mercedes one.