Aside from the Visa Cash App RB team, every outfit brought some sort of upgrade to the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
The effectiveness of those upgrades is difficult to judge after just one race, although no team appear to have taken a similar step forward to the one McLaren took in Miami.
Speaking on The Race Podcast, journalist Scott Mitchell-Malm was far from impressed by one team’s offering.
While McLaren and Red Bull appear to the teams capable of challenging for race wins, the groups that teams are racing in further down the grid appear to be shifting.
Before, there were five teams clear at the top and five teams fighting to finish in the top ten, but there are now four battles going on.
Ferrari can count themselves alongside Red Bull and McLaren at the front, while Alpine, Williams and Sauber are fighting towards the back of the grid.
Mercedes are very much in a class of their own in fourth, while Visa Cash App RB and Haas have dragged Aston Martin into the midfield battle.
Aston Martin brought the largest set of upgrades to Imola, but the results on the track didn’t suggest much progress has been made.
Lance Stroll finally returned to the points and overtook an F1 legend’s career points tally in the process, but Fernando Alonso had his worst weekend of the season so far.
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Aston Martin upgrades left a lot to be designed during the Imola Grand Prix
It’s been a decent but unspectacular season for Aston Martin after the first seven race weekends.
Fernando Alonso was once again disrupting the first few rows of the grid in qualifying but the top four teams have taken small steps forward while Aston Martin appear to have stood still.
Mike Krack and his team have done enough to convince the two-time world champion to commit his future to Aston Martin for the upcoming rule changes in 2026.
Lance Stroll has once again failed to match his teammate at times in 2024, going three races on the bounce without scoring points and falling behind Yuki Tsunoda in the Drivers’ Championship.
Aston Martin’s upgrades would have made very little difference to Alonso’s race in Imola after crashing in practice and starting from the pit lane.
And while Stroll’s drive through the pack in the latter stages of the races was impressive, it’s hard to know how much of an impact the new parts on his car made.
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Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll being left behind in F1’s midfield
Talking about the upgrade package Aston Martin brought to Imola, Mitchell-Malm said: “I think given the fact that Aston Martin had an upgrade that numerically dwarfed any other at Imola in terms of the visible aspect of it, the size of it in terms of actually how big the upgrade was and what it was meant to be worth, obviously only the teams know what they’re expecting and how they quantify it.
“But just in terms of the number of new parts that each team declared, Aston’s was the biggest and it seemed to make no difference.
“Now, obviously as I was saying before, with so many other teams introducing upgrades that does move the goalposts a little bit.
“If everybody does a really good job, then the competitive picture can look the same as it did a couple of races ago even if Aston Martin did a really good job with that upgrade.
“But, given it looked a bit difficult at times and [Fernando] Alonso had a particularly disastrous weekend, it wasn’t utterly abysmal not like a couple of weekends towards the end of last year when they introduce upgrades that seemed to get them a little bit lost.”
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Fernando Alonso will want more progress to justify new Aston Martin contract
It may be a case that the upgrades that Aston Martin brought to Imola simply didn’t suit the circuit but they looked no closer to catching Mercedes, let alone the top three teams.
Fernando Alonso is the man to build the team around even if Helmut Marko wouldn’t necessarily have him at Red Bull.
Karun Chandhok was left confused with the mistake he made in qualifying and starting from the pit lane at Imola makes scoring points nearly impossible without a couple of safety cars.
The Spaniard must be hoping that he can expect more from the car when they head to Monaco.
It was a race he will still believe he should have won last year but Aston Martin look nowhere near being able to deliver that level of performance in 2024.
The post ‘Difficult’: F1 team that brought ‘biggest’ upgrade to Imola saw ‘no difference’ in performance – journalist appeared first on F1 Oversteer.