Karun Chandhok: Lawrence Stroll’s driving Aston Martin to F1 title contention. But will Lance blow it?

The next two years are critical for Aston Martin. In the early races of ’23, Fernando Alonso and his green squad were the feel-good story of Formula 1, racking up the podiums with such regularity that we all started dreaming about them becoming race win contenders and maybe even giving the Spaniard a crack at a third title in the near future, nearly 20 years after his last one.

Fast forward to 18 months later and the dream has turned into a bit of a nightmare. Aston Martin went from scoring 280 points in 2023 to just 94 in 2024, worryingly a massive 572 points behind fellow Mercedes customer team McLaren with exactly the same power unit.

The lack of a single podium in 2024 was one thing but the bigger worry was the absence of progress with race pace as the season went on. There’s a bit of a trend back to the Spanish Grand Prix in 2023 from when the team started to lose competitiveness relative to the opposition. In the early part of 2023, Aston was 0.57% away from the pace-setting Red Bull but the average from Spain onwards went up to 1.05%.

I read a quote from the new team principal Andy Cowell recently that said that the team “won the championship for the most updates in 2024 but they didn’t seem to deliver the laptime”, an equation that he will be looking to flip around for 2025. Alonso’s brilliant tenacity and consistency kept them scoring points but both he and the Strolls will want more.

Lawrence Stroll deserves a lot of credit for putting his money where his mouth is. The new factory and wind tunnel are seriously impressive and there’s been a star cast of technical brains brought to the team. Midway through 2023, Dan Fallows was being hailed as the man who was going to turn Aston Martin into a title contender like Adrian Newey did at Red Bull 16 years earlier. Yet by the end of 2024, with the car upgrades not delivering, he was gone with Newey himself coming to Aston.

This will be Andy Cowell’s first full season in charge of the organisation. Cowell is not just an incredibly clever engineer, but if you listen to his former colleagues at Brixworth they also talk highly about him being a very good people manager. This skill is going to be especially useful as the team has gone through the growing phase of rising from the lean, mean Racing Point operation to 2026 when they will be seen as one of the big Formula 1 teams, with an exclusive works Honda deal.

He has already shown that he’s not afraid to make the decisive moves to restructure the team by first moving Fallows on after the disappointment of the Austin upgrade but also then promoting himself to team principal and recognising that Mike Krack’s time was far better spent focusing on the trackside operations. The next important phase will be to try and replicate the no-blame and ultra-efficient culture that Cowell was a part of in the Mercedes glory years.

Newey’s programme at Aston for 2025 is going to be about observing and putting the foundations in place for the new era beginning in 2026. Adrian has rightly said that the 2026 regulations make F1 an “engine formula” and he’s got a very valid point. This is the first time in F1 history that I can recall the engine rules dictating the chassis ones. In a nutshell, the plan for the power units to be 50/50 in terms of electric and combustion engine power means that the cars have to be much less draggy, otherwise they would run out of electrical juice.

The risk is that like we saw in 2014, one manufacturer could get it much more right than the others which will massively affect the pecking order. With tighter restrictions in terms of changes within the homologation cycle, it will be hard for anyone to make up a deficit so the Silverstone camp will really be hoping that Honda get it right straight away – unlike when they arrived back in F1 in 2015.

“If Lance wasn’t there, Lawrence wouldn’t have bought the team”

The ever-present elephant in the room when talking about Aston Martin is, of course, the driver in the second seat. It is an assumption that Lance is guaranteed a place for as long as he wants it. But having been outqualified 23–7 last year and scored just 24 points versus 70 for Alonso, can the team give away a performance deficit when they’re spending an awful lot of time and money to build up the whole operation into becoming a top team?

It’s a tricky and actually unprecedented situation because if Lance wasn’t there, then Lawrence Stroll would probably not have bought the team (and car company!). His personal journey will be as intriguing to follow over the next few years as Aston Martin’s competitive trajectory.