Fernando Alonso believes that low track temperatures at the Formula 1 Las Vegas GP should give his Aston Martin team a boost over the course of the weekend.
The AMR24 has been very good at getting temperature into its tyres, which helps to explains why Alonso has often performed better over one lap in qualifying than in races.
That characteristic could prove useful for the team relative to its midfield rivals given the low temperatures associated with the night race.
“I’m optimistic,” said Alonso. “It’s a different track. Tyre temperature is an issue, because it’s very, very cold, long straights, and maybe this year’s car is one of the strengths that we have, we heat the tyres quite quickly, and we are okay in qualifying, where the tyres need to be in temperature very, very fast.
“I hope we can go back to our top of the midfield position, not the top four teams, but if we can be fifth or sixth team here, I think points are available on the race, and that will be the target.”
Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough agreed that good tyre warm-up could help the team this weekend.
“I think that has been a strength of our car this year,” he said. “We’ve often been able to get the tyres working well in qualifying. Obviously you want to look after the tyres in the race as well, so that those two are normally pretty well linked.
“We did a lot of learning last year. It was obviously very, very low grip last year, a huge track evolution, but still low grip offline all the way through the weekend. There’s a lot of similarities, obviously, to tracks like Baku, as far as circuit efficiency, running low rear wing levels, lots of low speed corners.
“We had a lot of graining with the tyres last year. Obviously, the tarmac should has aged, it should be better. We’ll do a lot of learning this year again. But I thought it was a real technical challenge last year, a good fun track – something a bit different.”
Meanwhile Alonso stressed that the team needs to gain some momentum as it heads into 2025.
“We are all trying to understand the problems of the car and the performance that we need to find,” said the Spaniard.
“And we seem to lost some of the performance that we had at the beginning of the year. And yeah, try to get better in the next few weekends, and especially into next year. A lot of changes in the team, the technical side as well.
“And we need to accommodate, and we need to shortcut all the all the time that is needed, because F1 is racing every two weeks, and we don’t have time to really think too much.
“But yeah, it’s good that the season is also finishing, and we have a little bit of a break to regroup, to reset a little bit, and hopefully next year, learn all the possible things that went wrong this year, and get better for 2025.”
Adam Cooper F1 