Alonso’s first reaction to his Aston Martin after driving the first day of the F1 2024 preseason test

Fernando Alonso made his debut in the 2024 Formula 1 preseason test (only three days, from February 21 to 23) this Wednesday in Bahrain, participating at the wheel of his Aston Martin in the morning session. And he did it with good feelings. This is what Mike Krack, director of the Silverstone team, said when referring to the reaction of Fernando Alonso and his assessments regarding the performance of the new AMR24 for the 2024 F1 season after the Spaniard finished in third position in the morning session. The Spaniard started the preseason with a smile and Mike assured that the Spaniard finished “very happy” with the work done.

“We already filmed a commercial event at Silverstone last week (on the filming day allowed by the regulations and limited to 100 km). But here, obviously, it’s a different track“, with more temperature, we have different information and Fernando is very happy with how everything turned out,” He said at a press conference in Bahrain, as reported by the ‘Motorsport.com’ portal.

“I think it is important when you have a new car that you have a good feeling to start with, that you can do many laps without finding major mistakes and that everything works as planned in the program”, featured the Aston Martin Team Principal. And despite the fact that Max Verstappen was the fastest in the morning with a surprising and innovative Red Bull, marking a

1’32″548 where he outpaced Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari by 0.699 and Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin by 0.837, it’s clear the Asturian has more in his pocket.

With Fernando’s best lap, the Spanish driver had a personal record in the first two sectors with a margin of half a second over the previous reference record and ended up with a clear leg up in the third sector. At that time he achieved the best time, but no personal record in the last sector, where he lost 3 tenths, a sign that there is more potential in that car..

Aston Martin features excellent reliability

But above all, as Krack highlights, if there’s one thing to appreciate on days where the times are so hard to read and where all the teams roll without revealing their cards, it’s being reliable

The most important thing in testing is to drive a lot to gather a lot of data to understand the car and its future development path, and Alonso nailed it: he was the driver who did the most laps of the morning with a total of 77, 11 more than Verstappen’s 66. Furthermore, the sensations are good because Fernando seems comfortable, no corrections, rides well all the time and once he pushes, the times come out easily as they did at the beginning of last year .

However, Mike Krack didn’t want to jump into the pool when asked if Aston Martin could perform again like it did at the start of last year. “We will see…”, he commented. And there is still a lot of potential to be discovered in the many cars that appear as Aston Martin’s rivals to chase Red Bull, such as Ferrari, McLaren, the Visa Cash (formerly Toro Rosso) or a Mercedes that did not start well at all.

“I’m quite happy. Fernando has done a great job, because we even finished the work program more than we thought”Krack added.

“I think it was a good morning, a good start. We had a pretty extensive program. Everything went like clockwork. We were outside when the light turned green and we finished our entire program. We now have a lot of aerodynamic data, cooling data, all the normal things you need to do at the start of a preseason. And we’re happy with how it went. No big deal.”he added, raising the reliability of the starting car, an important point for the first day of the preseason, with the first race of the year very close to the calendar (next week).

There are many more parts to put in Alonso’s car

In addition, Mike Krack announced that over the next two days of preseason testing, Aston Martin will debut new parts to continue adding performance to the car.

“This is the car from the beginning of the season, but the development continues. We’ll have different pieces tomorrow and the next day. Race development is brutalbut we have launched a very strong development program,” he commented. And Aston Martin made it clear at the AMR24 presentation that they are committed to creating a very good base from which to make sure they can improve a lot during the course. to end one of its biggest weaknesses from last year: year-round vehicle development.

“We are very happy with the drivers we have, we are talking to them both and we want to continue with them both,” he concluded regarding the future of Fernando Alonso, who ends his contract with Aston Martin at the end of the year it is one of the good candidates for Hamilton’s wheel at Mercedes by 2025.