Fernando Alonso has described his key objective for Aston Martin’s huge Hungarian GP upgrade.
The Silverstone-based team opted not to make incremental upgrades in a similar vein to rival teams, instead grouping all of its resources into a sizeable package for Alonso and Lance Stroll in Budapest.
As others have developed, Aston Martin has fallen back in terms of pace, and was nearly two seconds slower than Cadillac in qualifying at the Belgian Grand Prix.
However, Alonso does not believe that there is “no package in the world” which would eradicate that gap in one weekend, and is instead focusing on ensuring that the upgrades delivered improve the AMR26 chassis in such a way that a path to the midfield and points-scoring is mapped out.
“It is not that I need answers; I think I have a pretty clear picture with the team that we will fix all the problems, they will take time, but I have no doubts,” Alonso told media, including RacingNews365.
“I have zero doubts that Adrian will provide the best car sooner or later, and I would like to see the step with this package and the understanding after the first couple of races, and I think that is going to be more for next year and in the years to come.
“With the power unit, I have no doubts, and it is a matter of time that Honda fixes the issues because this is what we’ve been doing for the last 40 years of racing.
“We started on the back foot, and we are dealing with that process and pain, but we are working together to fix the issues.
“Just how soon the car will be competitive, the next few races will give us an idea, but I am not thinking too much on numbers of positions [we can gain].
“If we go back to the last five races, we have had very different gaps with the midfield, and a more or less consistent gap to pole position, which is unreachable at the moment, but [Silverstone and Spa] were a couple of tough circuits, and at Spa, the guy in front was 2.1s ahead.
“So there is no package in the world that will give you that amount of time, and probably the position will not change if we ran the updated car in Spa, so that is how we treat it.
“Hopefully, Budapest is a friendly circuit; power is not the most important thing, but we still have some deficits that we need to overcome.
“But I am more into understanding what the direction of the car is and whether we are on a good path?”