Aston Martin F1 yet to match Force India’s heights – Szafnauer

Aston Martin is yet to scale the heights it achieved under the entry’s previous guise as Force India, according to the team’s former Chief Operating Officer Otmar Szafnauer.

Szafnauer was hired in October 2009 and played an instrumental role in elevating Force India’s competitiveness on a limited budget when Vijay Mallya was the owner.

However, the entity was plunged into administration midway through 2018, paving the way for a consortium led by billionaire Lawrence Stroll to complete a takeover.

Running the Racing Point moniker before evolving into Aston Martin, Szafnauer remained at the helm until early 2022 when he exited and was replaced by Mike Krack.

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Comparing the two regimes he worked under, Szafnauer suggested Stroll was more involved due to the connection related to having his son Lance as one of its drivers.

“The significant differences are, Vijay was hands-off – Vijay didn’t have a son in the car either,” Szafnauer told Inside Line. “So because of it, there’s less emotion and more objective decision-making.”

“Both of them wanted the best on-track performance possible. They both had that drive – ‘we want better, we want better, we want better’. So I experienced that from both parties.

“Lawrence actually spent a lot more money in being able to get that performance. It’s not that Vijay didn’t [spend], but Lawrence spent an order of magnitude more. Ironically, the performance at the end of Force India was better than they’re performing today.”

Stroll’s commitment to turning the Silverstone-based squad into F1 World Champions has yielded a widespread recruitment drive from rival teams – including Dan Fallows from Red Bull – and the creation of a state-of-the-art new headquarters, which opened last year.

Szafnauer admitted that he had concerns regarding how it would be able to maintain pace on the track while balancing that widespread upheaval behind the scenes.

“My fear was, with all the change coming, how do we make sure that it doesn’t have a big impact on track performance?” he said. “And I don’t know the answer to that. We’ll see in the future.”

The operation peaked with successive fourth-place finishes in 2016 and 2017, a particularly impressive achievement as it was managed over two regulation cycles.

Stroll’s tenure began with consecutive seventh places as the team played catch up following the uncertainty of the sale process. However, the decision to replicate the title-winning 2019 Mercedes W10 propelled Racing Point up the order in 2020 and it ended fourth with a maiden win, despite having 15 points docked for an infraction.

After successive placings of seventh since morphing into Aston Martin, the team emerged as the closest contender to a dominant Red Bull squad in the opening rounds. Although it was outdeveloped, the British marque amassed 225 more points than it had done the season prior and scored eight podiums through Fernando Alonso.

But despite its total of 280 points being 95 more than it had achieved under past incarnations of the team, Szafnauer believes Force India still performed at a higher level.

“After Aston Martin embarked on new factories and new management, I think they were seventh and fifth now. We’ll see what next year brings,” the 59-year-old continued.

“But when I was there under Racing Point, we were fourth. The year of administration we were seventh only because we had all of our points taken away, we really should have been fourth that year. The following year we were seventh and then back up to fourth again.

“And then since then it’s been seventh [in 2021 and 2022] and fifth [in 2023]. Not as good as Force India at the end.”

Szafnauer also detailed how the team has been set up to help Lance Stroll develop, which has extended to hiring multiple-time champions Sebastian Vettel and Alonso.

“The engineers working closely with Lance have to be sometimes brutally honest to be able to extract the best performance,” he explained.

“There are other people within the team too that help, the physiotherapist and sports psychologist and the usual entourage that everybody has or the drivers have to make sure that they’re working at the highest level.

“There’s also hiring World Champions to sit alongside Lance in order for him to be able to see what World Champions do and how they go about their business to be able to emulate that.

“So all those things, they’re in place and I think because of it they’re going to be better off.”