Lance Stroll has said Aston Martin need to find four seconds of performance over the remaining days of preseason testing if it wants to match the front running teams at first race of the season in Australia.
The AMR26 is the first Aston Martin to benefit from the presence of legendary designer Adrian Newey at the team, but made a slow start to preseason after arriving late at the opening test in Barcelona last month.
The team has added mileage to the Honda-powered car during this week’s test in Bahrain, but when Stroll faced the media on Thursday afternoon, his teammate Fernando Alonso was 4.6 seconds off the fastest lap of the test set by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
“I don’t know, I mean, right now we look like we’re four seconds off the top team, four and a half seconds,” Stroll said when asked if Aston Martin could catch up by the first race on March 8.
“It’s impossible to know what fuel loads and everything people are running, but, you know, now we need to try and find four seconds of performance.”
Headline lap times can be notoriously misleading in testing as teams chase various objectives, track conditions change, and cars run with different fuel loads.
But when Stroll was asked if the current performance deficit could be recovered by running a normal test programme over the remaining days, he suggested the team still had a long way to go.
“I don’t think it [the performance needed] falls from the sky, you know,” he said. “I think you have to improve and find performance in the car and the engine, I mean, these are just usual things in F1.
“When you’re behind the competition, you have to think about ways to extract more from the package you have, and at the same time also improve. No one stands still in this business, everyone’s trying to find performance in every way and every weekend, all the time.
“We’re doing that, we’re trying to find and extract more performance every day from the car and I think also longer term bring upgrades on the power unit side, on the chassis side and we will see in Australia where we line up and then we will see throughout the season how we progress.
“But, I mean, we’re pushing as hard as we can and, you know, that’s all we can do right now.”
Aston Martin has set its sights on winning championships in the coming years and Newey’s arrival along with the addition of an exclusive power unit deal with Honda were seen as key steps towards that goal.
While Stroll played down expectations for the start of the season, he said the team’s ultimate objectives have not changed.
“I mean, we are where we are,” he said. “Do we want to fight for race wins? Yes. Are we fighting for race wins today? Doesn’t look like it. Does that mean we can’t fight for race wins in the future? I believe we can.
“So, you know, I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball. I didn’t have a crystal ball before the season started and we are where we are here today. It doesn’t look like it’s amazing.
“Can that change in the next few weeks? Can it get a lot better? For sure. Will it 100% get way better? I don’t know.
“I don’t have the answers to those questions. So all I can say is we’re pushing as hard as we can. We’re focused on bringing performance to the car, to the engine every single second of every single day and time will tell how competitive we look at the first race and throughout the whole season.”
