Sebastian Vettel, Aston Martin, Silverstone, 2021

Aston Martin capable of hitting title target – Perez

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In the round-up: Sergio Perez has said his former team Aston Martin – previously known as Racing Point – is capable of delivering on team owner Lawrence Stroll’s target of competing for the world championship within five years.

In brief

Perez: Aston Martin’s strong point is in team members

Aston Martin has been on a major recruitment drive recently and team owner Lawrence Stroll has said it expects to be a contender for the world championship within five years.

Perez believes it’s a realistic goal for his former team. “In five years a lot of things can happen, for sure,” he sad. “And I think Lawrence, his team are aware of things in Formula 1, to be successful, it can take a long time.

“They have very good people from Andy [Stevenson], from Otmar [Szafnauer] and all the senior members, all the engineers. They’re very, very strong people.

“I think the question will be how fast they are able to grow, how fast they want to integrate the whole team, but certainly they have very good people. And I really hope that they stay together for many years because that team, it historically has a very strong link to the people and to the unity of the team members.”

Home win for Dennis in first London Eprix race

Jake Dennis has taken his second career Formula E victory with a dominant performance on home ground in London.

Alex Lynn had taken pole during a wet-to-dry qualifying session that seemed to favour the drivers in lower groups. However, Dennis qualified alongside him and was in a position to take his second career Formula E victory from the outset.

Dennis was able to take the lead during Lynn’s first Attack Mode activation and the Mahindra driver was unable to make a comeback.

Despite pressure from Nyck de Vries, Lynn held on to second for much of the race before being relegated to third during a subsequent Attack Mode activation. Dennis took the chequered flag and a home win in the first London race, with De Vries in second and Lynn completing the podium for a home third-place finish.

Techeetah lead teams’ championship

Despite a mixed season for DS Techeetah, who are not showing the dominant form of their previous two campaigns, an eighth-place finish for Antonio Felix da Costa in the first London Formula E round has allowed Techeetah to take the lead in the constructors’ championship.

Jean-Eric Vergne failed to score in the race around docklands’ ExCel centre but Da Costa’s four points were enough to push them ahead of Envision Virgin by two points, going into the second London round with 148 to Virgin’s 146.

Mercedes commence Formula E title fightback

Having started the season looking dominant despite being excluded from qualifying at the second Diriyah round due to a powertrain infringement, Mercedes have failed to score any in five subsequent rounds of this year’s Formula E championship.

But Nyck de Vries’ second-place finish in the first London race, along with a seventh-place for Stoffel Vandoorne, brought them a substantial opportunity to eat into rivals’ Virgin and Jaguar’s leads, neither of the other teams scoring any points at all during the first round.

Team principal Ian James said they had a powertrain package capable of handling London’s constant energy demands, shown by both drivers being able to move up the field despite relatively poor qualifying. “With this track not being too demanding in terms of energy consumption, the field could push throughout. That didn’t prevent our drivers from being able to overtake and fight their way through the field on pure speed.

“Nyck put in stellar overtakes, somehow managing to finish the race in second place at one of the narrowest Formula E tracks I can personally think of. Stoffel managed to do the same; putting in steady lap times, and overtaking where an opportunity arose, meaning some more good points for the team.

“London so far has also showed us again how quickly things can swing around in this championship; we managed to gain position and close the gap to the other teams in the team standings.”

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Comment of the day

AJ suggests a way to equalise F1 teams’ development cycles would be to allow backmarker teams more time to understand new regulations.

Unless you make F1 a spec series, this will always be the case no matter what the rules and regulations are. There will be some teams who get the design philosophy right, some slightly off the mark, some way off the mark.

One way to minimise this is to reveal the rules one by one to teams based on constructors position starting from last at regular intervals. It is like giving the backmarkers a head start, who generally have inferior tools and engineers compared to the top teams.

Although that would be unfair, extremely difficult to police the transfer of information, and highly absurd, F1 has implemented the wind tunnel testing allocation rule which based on a similar idea.
@asleepatthewheel

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Hazel Southwell
Hazel is a motorsport and automotive journalist with a particular interest in hybrid systems, electrification, batteries and new fuel technologies....

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15 comments on “Aston Martin capable of hitting title target – Perez”

  1. As soon as one introduces an effective budget cap all other equalisation measures should be abolished.

  2. Yeah, like Williams won’t tell Mercedes what the rules are as soon as they won’t find out.

    It’s a good suggestion from the commenter. But in the complex interconnected F1 teams world, it won’t work

  3. Maho Pacheco
    25th July 2021, 8:06

    Or just more testing time, maybe more pre-season testing days for backmarkers. Maybe even more testing time (hours, minutes) n practice 1/2/3.

    1. This is imo the best solution.

    2. Interesting! Why not FP1s reserved to backmarkers, FP2s for all teams but only with rookies and then free FP3s?

    3. Invert the qualification format!
      Q1 determines the top 5 on the grid. Q2 has the 15 remaining drivers battle for 6 to 10. Q3 fills in the back of the grid.
      This way the backmarkers get more track time than the top teams…

  4. A good bet back in 2008 that eventually came true.

    COTD: A good suggestion, but possibly impractical.

  5. I recently read (not sure where) that the engineers at Aston Martin are frustrated by the new direction they have to follow.
    Coming from a small but enthusiastic team with lots of own innovative ideas, they are forced to work on a copy of a design they did not made themselves.
    That can be quite frustrating for creativity, the stronghold of the former red point/force India team.

    1. The base may be a copy but all of the things that have been added to it since the start of last season have been pure Racing Point/Aston Martin designs/developments & there are things on that car now which are very different to the direction Mercedes have gone.

      Also remember it was only supposed to be a one season thing. Use the 2019 Mercedes as a base for the 2020 car to allow more resources to be put into the all new 2021 car for the new regulations. However with the 2020 car been carried over to 2021 & 2021 regulations pushed back to 2022 they have ended up having to spend more time working on the ‘copy’ than they planned to.

      1. But stil painting over a picture created by another artist.
        The way they used to work, and the freedom that came with it, are gone.

        1. All thanks to Perez’s manipulative ouster of the passionate racer Dr. Vijay Mallya , the pioneer who rescued Perez when Mclaren almost killed his career in motorsports.

        2. Joop deBruin
          28th July 2021, 20:04

          Look at F1 over the years when it wasn’t a spec series. When a team had a winning combination, everyone copied. With this team tied to Merc for powerplant, it made sense for that one year.

  6. Been told that the viewing figures averages for Qualifying on Friday at Silverstone were down (In places quite sharply) on what qualifying has been averaging in it’s usual Saturday afternoon slot this season. The figures for the sprint race were broadly in line with what qualifying tends to get on Saturday although were down in several markets. The race on Sunday performed on-par with other recent races.

    And when I say ‘averages’ I mean overall rather than any specific broadcaster/region.

    Overall the new format & sprint race doesn’t seem to have moved the needle in the way they were expecting. They were expecting Friday evening qualifying to draw a higher audience than it did due to the time slot & were also expecting the sprint to draw a higher audience than traditional qualifying, In part due to it been a bit later in the day but also due to it been a new thing which in theory should have garnered a bit of additional interest.

    1. @gt-racer I wonder if word needs to get out there about the Sprint weekends, and now that there is a reference to one, I wonder what the viewership will be like for the next one. It will be interesting to see if viewership grows as word gets around, or stays stagnant. I am also of course intrigued with how viewership in general goes next year, not in relation to Sprint weekends, but just in that if F1 becomes more about ‘gladiators in closer combat’ shall we say, with cars able to race more closely, will that boost the audience. Of course that is the aim of Liberty. And as we know, the predictably of the same winner all the hurts viewership. What is viewership like in terms of numbers now that we have this LH/MV duo compared to last year? And of course the numbers will get interesting to see if it goes down to a final last race of the season Championship decider.

    2. Way to early to come to that kind of conclusions.
      Part of the viewers did not even knew the changes in time and activities.

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