Aston Martin very ambitious for 2024: 'Red Bull Racing are beatable'

Aston Martin hope their eight podium finishes in 2023 is the only the start of a nice progression. The team want to grow into Grands Prix winners in the coming years and then become world champions. To achieve this in the short term, the British team must first deal with Red Bull Racing. Dan Fallows, Aston Martin F1's technical boss, thinks Max Verstappen's team is beatable.

Looking ahead to the upcoming season, Fallows says he expects the differences in lap times between teams to be very small. "I think that sort of suggests that people are probably less able to take a big conceptual step away from the kind of things that we're seeing on the majority of cars," the Briton told GPblog and others, referring to the Red Bull concept.

"From now on, we will look at the small details to find lap times. They are kind of more detailed elements of the floor and other parts of the car, but there's still a lot of lap time to come and we take the approach that Red Bull are absolutely beatable. That's what we're chasing after, we're focusing on them, and that's what we're aiming for."

Stroll holds battle on the sidelines

Lance Stroll is one of the drivers that Verstappen and co could beat in that case. GPblog passed Fallows' words on to the Canadian, and at first, he jokingly replied, "You've then just got to build a faster race car. In all seriousness, they've been dominating the sport for the last couple of years since the new set of regulations. And Max has also been driving outstandingly. He's on top of his form. So it's a challenge for sure."

Next, Stroll is coy: "I don't think our goal is really to go out and beat Red Bull. We want to get there eventually. But our goal is really to just be the strongest team we can be. We have a lot of ideas and a lot of things in the pipeline to be a much stronger team. That's where our focus is. Last year, when we were just trying to be as strong as we could be, we really had a great car, and we were able to fight for great positions and get some really strong results. So that's our focus," Stroll said.