The issue forcing Alonso to “invent” overtakes in F1 Aston Martin

In Fernando Alonso’s first Formula 1 season with Aston Martin, 2023, he claimed six podiums in the first eight races and was running third in the championship. The pickings have been more barren since then and in the Spanish Grand Prix – the ninth round of 2025 – he picked up his first points of the season.

Lance Stroll had scored all of Aston Martin’s points until then – a humble 14, drawn from the first two rounds.

Heads already rolled in Aston’s technical department last season and the AMR25 car has not started the season well, seeming to have a fundamental problem with race pace. Stroll’s tendency to qualify poorly and then pick up positions partially masks a trend of the car being slower on Sundays than it is on Saturdays, though the only time this season he qualified inside the top 10 (at Imola) he finished 15th.

Alonso, though, has reached Q3 three times and only now got a return in the form of two points (it would have been one but for Max Verstappen’s penalty). A notable feature of the first and last rounds of this latest triple-header has been his tendency to overtake at unconventional points on the track, usually via a sneak attack.

“We lacked top speed, so on the straights we were losing a lot,” he said in Barcelona. “I didn’t make a single overtake under DRS. They were all made in Turn 3 on the outside, which is not a normal place to overtake, but we have to invent these kinds of moves.

“Also at Imola I was out of Turn 7 when I made three overtaking [moves] in the last few laps. So we need to solve this situation and start overtaking on the straight with the DRS like everyone [else] does.”

“We need to improve our straightline speed a little bit and also the [tyre] degradation. As I said, Saturdays are quite competitive and on Sundays we seem to take a step back.

“I’m happy for today for sure: first points, a good Safety Car at the end, good timing and things. But if we go back to Thursday and we redo the weekend, we need to change something on the car to be a little bit more Sunday-biased than [Saturday-biased].”

Alonso can be relied upon to highlight his own contributions to a result with the enthusiasm of a carnival barker. But both he and chief trackside officer Mike Krack alluded to the car being under-balanced, with too much understeer.

It’s common for teams to set up their cars to have an understeer balance at circuits such as Barcelona because the rear axle is the critical one, and some understeer can help protect the rear tyres. But when asked by Autosport if the problem was caused by dialling in too much understeer, Alonso’s answer was an unequivocal “no”.

Among Aston’s challenges last year was that most of the performance upgrades added to the car didn’t generate the expected results. While the AMR25 is the product of the previous design leadership, at Imola a new floor and bodywork package represented the first definitive output of the latest regime and the new wind tunnel.

It was never going to be worth half a second a lap, but CEO and team principal Andy Cowell talked about it in terms of a lab experiment to stress-test the team’s tools and procedures.

What’s becoming apparent is that the car has a weak front end – i.e. understeery – but it isn’t doing a great job of thermally managing its rear tyres either, and at the same time it is relatively drag-inefficient. The combination of slow straightline speed and indifferent tyre management is a killer on Sundays.

Lack of aerodynamic efficiency is killing the AMR25 on two fronts: it’s slow in a straight line, but the team can’t just cut downforce because the car will slide more, making tyre performance worse.

“The difference between the qualifying and the race is quite simple,” said Krack after the Barcelona race.

Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

“In qualifying you put on new tyres, new tyres, new tyres, new tyres. You mask a lot of the problems that the cars have.

“This is not only for our car, this is for all the cars. That is also why you see the small gaps in qualifying. Because all the weaknesses the cars have are being covered by the new tyres, by the new rubber.

“As soon as the tyres become two laps, three laps, four laps old, the weaknesses become more and more. That is why you see that the cars in the front are just going. That is why the field is spreading so much.”

Noticeably, Aston Martin has been ‘scrubbing’ its race tyre sets – essentially giving them a short run, usually during practice, to put a heat cycle through them. The process of bringing the tyres up to working temperature and then cooling them again changes the visco-elastic properties of the rubber.

It would be overly simplistic to say this improves grip and life characteristics on a linear scale, but there is a belief it can make the tyres less sensitive to graining and thermal degradation. Peak grip is lower, but the aim is to make the duration of the peak longer.

Aston Martin’s chief tyre performance engineer Jun Matsuzaki has been regarded as a key asset for many years and has been with the team since its Force India days, when he helped Sergio Perez become a ‘tyre whisperer’. Before that he worked for Bridgestone. It was Matsuzaki who first worked out that Pirelli’s rear tyres in 2013 could run longer stint lengths when mounted in the opposite direction they were designed to rotate.

So it’s unlikely that Aston’s performance deficit is being caused by not getting the best out of the tyres in terms of trackside operations. It’s a question of mechanical and aerodynamic design.

Alonso, for one, seems to believe the team now has a handle on the problem: “I think we know what is happening…”