Alonso's longrun impresses: 'Would be on podium with Red Bull'

"I've got Aston Martin third and potentially even a little bit closer to Ferrari. That's to do with Fernando Alonso's race run," said Kravitz, who saw the Spanish two-time world champion drive very consistent times. Tipping the RB19s' speed, however, the Aston Martin driver could not. "In Saturday's Bahrain GP [long runs] such as it was, it would have been Max Verstappen, Sergio Perez, and Fernando Alonso on the podium ahead of the Ferraris and the Mercedes."

Aston Martin hit the mark pretty hard last year with the AMR22. In the first Grands Prix, it failed to get out of Q1, which is why the AMR22-B, a completely new concept, was introduced back in Spain. From there, performance only got better and with the 2023 car, the aerodynamic team led by Dan Fallows (who came over from Red Bull) has taken another big step forward.

"Aston Martin had Red Bull worried from Day One, Adrian Newey mentioned them in the teams he's concerned about, the car is essentially good, it has some nice ideas," stated the pit reporter at Sky Sports. He sees Mercedes still need to make considerable progress in the coming period. "We need to see a big step from Mercedes over the next few days for them to be solidly third."