17/04/2022
NEWS STORY
It's fair to say that Aston Martin team principal, Mike Krack has joined the team at a difficult time, however he admits that he knew it was never going to be easy.
One would be hard-pressed to admit how Aston Martin's Melbourne weekend could have possibly been any worse.
Other than the well-documented misfortunes of drivers Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll, even the Aston Martin safety car came in for criticism, causing the FIA to leap to its defence.
Then, adding insult to injury, a fine drive by Alex Albon gave Williams its first point of the season, leaving Aston Martin as the only team yet to score a point... and with only one appearance in Q2 things are not looking to improve any time soon.
All this despite finishing seventh last year and fourth in 2020, and Lawrence Stroll's claim that the team will be challenging for the title within three years.
Team boss, Mike Krack, who was previously in charge of BMW's Formula E, GT and IMSA programmes, having previously worked with Porsche and BMW-Sauber, acknowledges that he has his work cut out.
"I had a lot of questions when I was approached for this position," he tells Autosport. "And when I got the answers I knew that this was going to be a big challenge.
"It would have been easy to run away from it," he admits, "so I was never going to expect that it was easy. But I'm not the kind of guy that looks for excuses.
"The first three races were not easy, really," he continues, in a masterpiece of understatement. "The whole thing is not together at the moment. We have to really work hard to get there.
There's no magic at the end of the day. At the end of the day, F1 is F1, it's hard. You have to have a quick car, you have to make no mistakes, you have to have good drivers."
Appointed at the eleventh hour to the role, Krack admits that he is still getting to know the team - a task not made any easier by the fact within days of joining the Silverstone-based outfit the season was underway.
"You clearly need to identify who works on which process, who is doing what," he says, "and, obviously when you are way racing you have a little bit less of an insight than you would have, if you have for example a three-month period at the factory to start with.
"I think it's six weeks or seven weeks by now," he continues. "But it's up to me to take the necessary steps to talk to the most people, try to identify where we are, what we have to improve and move on."
Another new appointment to the team is technical director, Dan Fallows, who began work with the team on 2 April, having spent the previous six months tending his garden after leaving Red Bull.
"We'll have to sit together and identify clearly how we develop the car, how we develop the performance, and how do we develop the structure of the team?," says Krack. "It's clearly the performance of the car and how we have to improve that is something that we will need to look in the next weeks."