Aston Martin left the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix in Formula 1 with two points scored by Fernando Alonso, but the team still believes there is performance to be found in the car. For Mike Krack, Head of Track Operations, the result in Zandvoort represents progress, although the team needs more races to fully understand the updates recently introduced.
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Krack explained that the update package presented at the Hungarian GP is still in the adaptation phase. According to him, the team needs to accumulate more sessions to understand how to make the best use of the new solutions and also the newly introduced power unit: “We are getting to know this package more and more. I think we said, with the big package we introduced in Budapest, that it would take a few sessions to learn how to deal with it and learn how to adjust it. And the same actually applies to the introduction of the power unit now. We need to learn how to use it, we need to learn how to optimize it and I think this will really take us a few steps, but it was a good step forward.”
The positive assessment does not mean that Aston Martin has already reached the limit of its new set. The executive highlighted that large-scale changes make it more difficult to find the ideal setup in all sessions, especially given the intensity of the calendar.
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“If you have changes on this large scale with the intensity of the sessions, it is always difficult to extract the maximum from them all the time. And the more sessions we have, the more we will be able to control this, but there will always be sessions where you will have a bit more difficulty, others where it will be easier and I think we had a pretty good setup this weekend.”
The team now hopes that the sequence of races will allow for more consistent performance. Despite the difficulties faced throughout the weekend in the Netherlands, the drivers’ feedback on the new package has been positive.
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