Aston Martin back to Australia: 'Then the team could have fallen apart'

From the rear, to the middle and already at the front of the grid. Aston Martin's rise is remarkable. More than a year after the team discovered that the 2022 car would not be a success, it has worked first on an update and for this year it has a car that can rival Mercedes and Ferrari. Looking back, the tipping point appears to have been reached in Australia, the country where Formula 1 will be present again next week.

It was a weekend of disaster. Aston Martin saw both Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll crash in the closing free practice last season. During qualifying, Stroll drove into Latifi, costing him a good starting position for the race. During that Grand Prix, Vettel flew off the track. Four crashes in three days, Aston Martin had hit rock bottom.

Mike Krack had only just taken office as the new team boss and saw how morale had sunk to an all-time low among his employees. "It was a very difficult moment but also I think it was the best moment for us as a team," he told Speedcafe. "Because we sat together, all of us, after these events, let’s put it like that, to keep the language normal, and the way we stuck together, it could have been easy to fall apart completely as a team."

That didn't happen. Indeed, a bond was formed between them. Aston Martin benefited from that for the rest of the season. “But we really stuck together well and decided ‘Okay, we have got to work ourselves out of this’, so for me, it was actually the highlight of last year.”