Krack: Team Morale surprisingly strong

Aston Martin has a flying start to their 2023 Formula 1 season with their AMR23 starting off as the second fastest car on the grid behind the Red Bull RB19.

And while Lance Stroll has not made use of the Green machine given to him by the team, teammate Fernando Alonso has seized the opportunity and delivered podiums for the team while scoring points in all 16 grands prix so far this year except for the Singapore Grand Prix where he finished 15th.

But Aston Martin's performance gradually dropped over the course of the season, with Alonso's last podium dating back to the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, as while the likes of McLaren, Mercedes, and even Ferrari managed to improve while Aston Martin couldn't keep up the development pace.

However, team boss Mike Krack insists his team is still motivated despite their slump, and when asked by the F1 Nation podcast about the morale within Aston Martin, he responded: "[It's] surprisingly strong [with] all of them, especially in the garage.

"You can see everybody wants to get back to the podium, everybody liked this experience from the beginning of the year, so the morale is strong, and it is something that we need to keep up also.

"But also, we need to not only talk about it, but we need to bring upgrades, we need to bring our car back into a better window and then the morale is anyway good," Krack added, speaking after the 2023 Japanese Grand Prix.

With six races remaining this season, and most F1 teams, if not all of them, now switching focus on their 2024 F1 challengers, what can be expected of Aston Martin?

"This is one of the most difficult questions," Krack said, "because when you look back over the last races it’s very difficult to make predictions.

"At the beginning, we thought you look at this track or this track and thought here we are going to be a bit better and here we are going to be a bit worse. But the last races have told us that any team can be on the back foot, anytime.

"We have seen it in Singapore with the guys that have won the championship, we have seen it in Monza, we were less competitive, we have seen in Zandvoort, Ferrari were less competitive.

"It’s going up and down I think for everybody and it’s really difficult to predict what is going to happen from now until the end," Krack concluded.

Aston Martin's drop in performance means they are now fourth in the 2023 F1 Constructors' Championship, 64 points behind third-placed Ferrari, while McLaren are 49 points behind them in fifth.