Fernando Alonso has soothed concerns Adrian Newey recently expressed about feeling "guilty" about not spending enough time talking through Aston Martin's upgrade plans.
The Silverstone squad is to finally deliver its eagerly anticipated upgrade to the Hungarian Grand Prix, with the team opting to not bring a package as it worked through the numerous problems it had with the AMR26 machine.
Newey, the managing technical partner, spoke at a special event at Aston Martin's factory over the British GP weekend to which media, including RacingNews365 were invited, in which he said that "perhaps we've been guilty of not spending enough time with Fernando and Lance, Jak [Crawford, reserve driver] here, kind of going through exactly what we are trying to achieve with the upgrade package."
However, Alonso, who has long been keen to work with Newey, soothed the concerns the most successful designer in F1 history had, and gave fascinating detail about what had been a factor in 'disagreements' over the car in recent times.
"I think to Adrian's comments, that it is more in the past than this year," Alonso began to media, including RacingNews365.
"In the past it is true that sometimes we had different opinions on race weekends in terms of feeling weaknesses of the car when we were racing with others, what we felt behind the wheel, and sometimes, when you go back to the factory, you see the data, and you discover things misbehaving on the aero that were pointing the direction of the car into two different ways.
"Maybe the winner was the data in those debates, but Adrian is the type of designer that listening to both the data for sure, but also what the driver feels. Formula 1 is very complex and very dynamic.
"It changes every lap, and you never have the same fuel load, tyres or wind conditions, or if you are following a car or are alone on track, there are many different things that can affect the balance - and that is why data is not 100% the truth.
"You need to combine things, and Adrian has the best experience in the world to design and develop a car, and we are on a good path.
"We are here to win races and fight for championships. We didn't start the season that way, because we are in the process of understanding these regulations and development, and for the first 10 races, all the teams opted for a more conventional strategy to bring two or three tenths every two or three races, and ended with one to one and a half seconds by race 10.
"We didn't do that, so fell behind, and now we will try to catch all in one."
Originally published by RacingNews365 —
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