At Aston Martin they were “fascinated” by Alonso

Fernando Alonso faces a new and ambitious challenge with Aston Martin from 2023. The Asturian driver was able to start working with his new team in the final test at Pirelli after the end of the season in Abu Dhabi, where he began to meet the his new engineers and mechanics, in addition to being able to study what things should be fixed in your passenger compartment to improve your comfort and to know the important procedures that you need to memorize from here to the beginning of the course. After that first contact, Aston Martin Team Principal, Mike Krack, praised Oviedo in an interview with RacingNews365.com, where he assured that Alonso “fascinated” the Silverstone team.

Mike assured that it would be “unfair” to judge the driver from Oviedo by his results in recent years and pointed out that it is necessary to go further, recalling that since he left Ferrari he has had no tires at his height in his hands.

“There’s more to it than that. If you look at the cars he’s driven, they haven’t been winning cars in recent years, so I don’t think it’s fair to judge him by wins and podiums. If you look at what he has done with all the teams he has driven. He drives, he is usually the faster of the two drivers. The points are also based on reliability, but what fascinates us is this commitment and the desire to to win, to test his best, his level of experience, it’s something very rare to see,” said Krack after Fernando fell to his Alpine teammate Esteban Ocon in the 2022 World Cup due to multiple reliability problems that suffered by the Spaniard in his car.

In this sense, the new boss of Fernando Alonso reiterated that he does not expect to have a problem with the Spaniard because he wants to have a competitive car. “I think we have to have a new approach. Maybe I am different from other team managers, and maybe he is a different driver. I will be surprised if we have problems,” he said.

This is how his signing was conceived

In addition, Mike Krack reiterated how the signing of Alonso came about, ensuring that it was a “quick” thing after Sebastian Vettel announced that he would not be continuing in F1. Faced with this possible situation, the team made it clear to Vettel that they would test the other drivers, something the German accepted without a problem.

“We always have Sebastian (Vettel) as Plan A, that was clear from the beginning, but we also told Sebastian: ‘If you decide not to continue, we also have to talk to other drivers’, and he was comfortable with that. I remember. that we had conversations with Sebastian where we clearly said: ‘We will talk to others, we will talk to the managers, they will see us maybe talk to others’. It’s a normal process, and he’s fine,” he said.

“Then we just waited for Sebastian to make his decision and we acted accordingly. So we decided, who would we choose if they were available? And then it was quick,” he added about his final choice: Fernando Alonso.

In this sense, Krack denied that they told Vettel that they no longer had his services: “No, it’s not true. It’s not true.”

“Sebastián made the conscious decision to stop and informed us on Wednesday before Budapest, and then we had to do everything to have a replacement,” he added in this regard.