A bad pit stop can cause your driver to lose one or more track positions. Let them tell the Ferrari team. Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc They had to experience it firsthand. And Aston Martin does not want it to happen, especially with the arrival of Fernando Alonso.
Tom McCulloughthe team’s performance director, has commented in statements collected by ‘Motorsport’ how the team has worked on this facet: “At the beginning of the year, we were really suffering with pit stops: we were the eighth, ninth or tenth best team in pit stops. And you can’t compete strategically with poor pit stops.”
“In practice we weren’t that bad. But, when the cars pitted, especially in a traffic situation, we had problems for various reasons”, explains one of the ‘bosses’ of the British team.
“We often do them with tires we didn’t even use in the race. So they ride just to do that pitstop practice. That is the main reason to do it. We try to understand those compounds, and there are some very small circumstances on certain tracks where maybe it helps,” he says.
However, from Pirelli they believe that this Aston Martin tactic is not very effective. affirms it mario isolahead of racing for the brand: “I spoke to Aston Martin many times about that and in my opinion, with our tires, with the characteristics of our compound, I am going to say that that is not very useful.
“It’s their choice. And that’s not prohibited, they can do it. Usually on that lap to ‘scrub’ the tire, maybe he takes off the grip Peak, but the compound stabilizes a little more. But it depends on how the compound is designed,” he detailed.
Aston Martin arrived at the races on many Sundays almost no new tires. And this was due to those specialized training sessions they did to improve speed when changing tires. Using the wheels for batches that only lasted one lap.