19/12/2023
NEWS STORY
Aston Martin's performance director, Tom McCullough has cited the team's former driver Sebastian Vettel as a key factor in its 2023 turnaround.
Having finished third overall in 2020 as Racing Point, as it morphed into Aston Martin the Silverstone-based outfit finished seventh for the next two seasons.
Those two seasons saw four-time world champion Vettel partnering Lance Stroll and over the course of the two years the team's only podium visit was the German's second in Baku in 2021.
He left at the end of 2022 and was replaced by another world champion, Fernando Alonso who scored a podium on his debut with the team and went on to score a further six over the course of the next seven races.
As the Spaniard began to be viewed as a serious championship threat, certainly in terms of runner-up to Max Verstappen, Vettel was soon forgotten.
However, speaking in Australia, as Alonso scored his third successive podium finish, team boss, Mike Krack was keen to make clear Vettel's part in the team's amazing turnaround.
"He has his merits in where the AMR23 is today," said Krack. "We had many, many meetings last year where he gave us a hint... do this, or do that, or do not do this with the new car, so I think he has his merits in here.
"He brought a lot of energy, a lot of positiveness when he arrived," he added. "He was leading by example at all times. He's there early, he's working really hard and it is this leading by example that everybody just sees and grabs on and gives an extra level of motivation."
While the Silverstone-based outfit eventually slipped to fifth in the 2023 standings, performance director, Tom McCullough agrees that Vettel's influence on the team was invaluable.
"When he joined us, he'd come from two championship-winning teams," says the Briton, according to Motorsport Week. "At that time he brought a lot of small details.
"He is a relentless worker as well. We often say the driver's the best sensor in the car, and a lot of the development, you've got a wind tunnel, you've got simulators, offline simulations, CFD.
"However, a driver whose backside's connected to the car well can say 'this is the phase of these kind of corners that I know we're struggling maybe more than others'. And then that allows you to go dig into the data."
Indeed, the Briton admits regret that the team was unable to achieve more with the four-time champ.
"For sure, we didn't give him a good enough car over the two years he was here," says McCullough. "By the end of his second year, we were making progress.
"I felt for him that he's not really got any of the benefit of this year's car. Over the years that often happens. I've been involved with that process myself in the past. At Williams, when we had Rubens Barrichello driving for us, he put so much work in during the 2010 and '11 seasons, as far as to say 'this is what you need to do, this what you should be doing' on so many areas of the car," he explained.
"The 2012 car, which unfortunately he didn't end up driving, was the result of a lot of the hard work he'd done. So that is very much the case."