Formula 1: Have Aston Martin Launched Into A Nightmare?

Attempting to draw any conclusions from the first three races of a Formula 1 season might be foolish. The 2021 season will be long, and teams make adjustments after every race. Even after a long practice and trial period pre-season, there are things about their cars and drivers that an F1 team can only find out on race days. Each year we come out of the trial period under the impression that the gap between Mercedes and Red Bull is closing. Each year, we’re proved wrong. Mercedes – or, to be more specific, Sir Lewis Hamilton – look as indomitable as ever. Hamilton’s victory in Portugal last weekend was nothing short of a masterclass. 

The cars at the front of the grid this season will, in almost every race, belong to the same teams as the cars that were at the front of the grid last season. Mercedes and Red Bull will fight their own battle while everyone else dukes it out for the third place. Based on the early evidence, though, there’s a name missing from that third-place battle this season, and that name is Racing Point. That’s not only down to the fact that Racing Point is now known as Aston Martin. While McLaren continues their rapid improvement and Ferrari slowly recover, Aston Martin has disappeared down the order. It seems that all is not well for Lawrence Stroll’s team. 

Racing Point shocked everybody with their success last season. Sergio Perez claimed a race win for the team, and Lance Stroll found himself on the poll in Turkey. From the first race through to the last, the team was faster and more competitive than anyone expected them to be. As the season progressed, we gained some insight into why that was. The nickname “Pink Mercedes,” given to the cars by the other teams in the paddock, was a telling one. Many of the other teams felt that the 2020 Racing Point car was a carbon copy of the championship-winning 2019 Mercedes car, painted pink in the hope that nobody would notice. The FIA, to an extent, agreed. They penalized the team for illegally copying the Mercedes, docking them fifteen championship points and fining them almost half a million dollars. They also tightened their rules for 2021 to ensure that no such “cloning” would occur in the future. 

The furor around the alleged copying incident and the change in the rules meant that Racing Bull, under their new guise as Aston Martin, had to go back to the drawing board for their 2021 car. Outwardly, they appeared to be confident about its prospects. They chose a beautiful shade of British racing green for their rebranded cars and convinced former four-time world champion, Sebastian Vettel, to join them after his ejection from Ferrari. To accommodate Vettel, they released Sergio Perez. Perez now drives for Red Bull and finished a respectable fourth behind Hamilton, Max Verstappen, and Valtteri Bottas in Portugal. When Perez crossed the line, both Vettel and Lance Stroll were more than a lap behind his pace. Racing Point has rebranded as Aston Martin, and in the process, it appears to have lost all of the threat that it posed to drivers at the front end of the field last season. 

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is not what Lawrence Stroll would have had in mind when he paid big money to secure Vettel and resurrected the Aston Martin name in the world’s most prestigious motorsport. Aston Martin’s brand managers will expect success. Vettel was promised a competitive car. Lance Stroll, who’s performances last season finally disproved the suggestion that he only had a seat in the sport because of his father, expected to take another step forward in his own career. Stroll, who has poured his heart, soul, and riches into his team, certainly won’t have expected to see his drivers finish outside the points regularly. Lance Stroll has secured only five championship points from the first three races of the season. Vettel, who must feel like he’s living a cursed life in the twilight of his once-glorious F1 career, has none at all. 

Pouring money into a Formula 1 team is not a guarantee of success, as many aspiring team principals have found out to their cost in the past. Money only buys you a chance of success, just as it does on the F1 racing online slots game that’s popular at so many internet casinos. If you were playing that game at one of the top casinos recommended by Sister Site,  you’d know there was no such thing as a guaranteed winner. Even then, though, you can sometimes improve your chances of success at slots by increasing your stake. Lawrence Stroll has done that with Aston Martin but doesn’t appear to be getting any closer to a winner. We can still extend that metaphor a little further. One of the many things that differentiates a good online slots player from a bad player is knowing when to get out if things aren’t going your way. Stroll didn’t become a billionaire by being careless or chasing lost causes. If he feels his team is going backward, this new partnership between Stroll, Aston Martin, and Formula 1 might not last for very long. 

Changing the design of the car was always likely to be a risk, but Stroll must have felt that the same engineers who delivered such fine performances for him in 2020 could do the same in 2021. As it turns out, perhaps they used the 2019 Mercedes as a template even more closely than most of us realized. Racing Point wasn’t a competitive team before 2020. If Aston Martin isn’t a competitive team in 2021, maybe those engineers never made any progress at all. Maybe they copied a more successful team, got found out, and are now unable to replicate that same success on their own merits. We’re not saying that’s definitely what’s happened in the 2021 season thus far, but the sudden and sharp drop-off in performance compared to the end of last season begs a lot of questions. Thus far, the team hasn’t provided much in the way of answers. 

As we said at the beginning of the article, there’s still a very long way to go. Both Vettel and the younger Stroll might find a way onto the podium later in the year. Right now, though, that looks like a very remote possibility. Aston Martin wanted its return to racing to be spectacular. So far, it’s been anything but.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SpeedwayMedia.com

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