Fernando Alonso's 2024 Mexican Grand Prix helmet

Aston Martin sink to second-slowest team but are they really that far off?

Lap time watch: 2024 Mexican GP

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Fernando Alonso is marking his 400th appearance in a round of the world championship this weekend.

Last year he joined Aston Martin for his 20th season in Formula 1. The move paid off as Aston Martin produced a competitive car, were consistently among the top four teams and the two-times world champion reached the podium eight times.

However 2024 has been a far more difficult campaign. Ahead of the 20th round today, Alonso has 62 points, a tally he exceeded in the first five events of last season. More worryingly for the team, they have been struggling with handling problems for much of the last year.

Neither Aston Martin reached Q3 in Mexico last year. They have made some gains since then: Indeed, only two teams have improved their lap times by more year-on-year. These are Haas and Alpine which, like Aston Martin, introduced significant upgrades for their car at the last round.

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Nonetheless, despite Alonso’s best efforts, Aston Martin’s best lap time was slower than that of every team besides Sauber (credit is due to Valtteri Bottas for reaching Q2 in the slowest car this weekend). They are the second-slowest team for only the second time this year, after Monaco:

Yuki Tsunoda, RB, Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, 2024
Tsunoda’s crash forced several drivers to abandon laps
Is that a fair reflection on their pace? Arguably not. Alonso is convinced he was on course for a significantly better time when he had to abandon his final lap in Q2 due to Yuki Tsunoda’s crash. He told his race engineer Chris Cronin he was on a “mega lap” before the red flags came out, worth “two tenths and a half.”

With that, Alonso could have made the cut for Q3. There he should have benefited from the improving track conditions and set a quicker lap. However there are others which might claim the same.

Red flags which disrupt qualifying sessions invariably produce losers and winners. Pierre Gasly is a clear example of the latter, bagging a higher grid position than his sector times indicated he deserved – and he was only six-thousandths of a second off pipping Kevin Magnussen to seventh.

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P. # Driver S1 S2 S3 Ultimate lap (deficit)
1 55 Carlos Sainz Jnr 27.037 (1) 29.296 (3) 19.533 (1) 1’15.866 (+0.080)
2 4 Lando Norris 27.204 (3) 29.191 (1) 19.67 (4) 1’16.065 (+0.195)
3 1 Max Verstappen 27.222 (4) 29.318 (4) 19.631 (3) 1’16.171
4 16 Charles Leclerc 27.069 (2) 29.429 (5) 19.693 (6) 1’16.191 (+0.074)
5 63 George Russell 27.361 (8) 29.263 (2) 19.624 (2) 1’16.248 (+0.108)
6 44 Lewis Hamilton 27.295 (6) 29.546 (6) 19.688 (5) 1’16.529 (+0.122)
7 22 Yuki Tsunoda 27.446 (12) 29.578 (8) 19.7 (7) 1’16.724 (+0.405)
8 20 Kevin Magnussen 27.272 (5) 29.624 (12) 19.854 (11) 1’16.750 (+0.136)
9 23 Alexander Albon 27.344 (7) 29.58 (9) 19.855 (12) 1’16.779 (+0.209)
10 27 Nico Hulkenberg 27.382 (10) 29.592 (11) 19.841 (9) 1’16.815 (+0.180)
11 10 Pierre Gasly 27.418 (11) 29.585 (10) 19.847 (10) 1’16.850 (+0.042)
12 81 Oscar Piastri 27.376 (9) 29.546 (6) 20.006 (17) 1’16.928 (+0.669)
13 14 Fernando Alonso 27.463 (13) 29.665 (14) 19.898 (15) 1’17.026 (+0.142)
14 30 Liam Lawson 27.579 (17) 29.64 (13) 19.833 (8) 1’17.052 (+0.110)
15 77 Valtteri Bottas 27.562 (16) 29.705 (15) 19.885 (14) 1’17.152 (+0.241)
16 18 Lance Stroll 27.504 (14) 29.848 (17) 19.873 (13) 1’17.225 (+0.069)
17 43 Franco Colapinto 27.769 (20) 29.832 (16) 19.936 (16) 1’17.537 (+0.021)
18 11 Sergio Perez 27.555 (15) 29.859 (18) 20.124 (20) 1’17.538 (+0.073)
19 31 Esteban Ocon 27.658 (18) 29.887 (19) 20.072 (18) 1’17.617
20 24 Zhou Guanyu 27.746 (19) 30.217 (20) 20.109 (19) 1’18.072

At the sharp end of the grid, Ferrari set the outright quickest lap time, as they also did in Baku, where they weren’t able to convert it to victory. Red Bull’s recent improvement was underlined by Max Verstappen’s second place on the grid, which meant McLaren were out-paced by two rival teams for the first time since the Canadian Grand Prix. But as always, what that means for their race pace will be most significant.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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2 comments on “Aston Martin sink to second-slowest team but are they really that far off?”

  1. They are only as slow as their “fastest” driver. Cough cough.

  2. For all their talk and investments, they have hardly anything to show. Yes, Sauber is even more of an emberassment right now, but for their sake I hope it’s because they’re focussed on 2026. But Aston with their expensive driver, new facilities and such, they really should do better. Seems they still can only perform by copy-pasting another team’s car.

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