Everyone at Aston Martin is feeling good after an excellent start to the new Formula 1 season – but it's still not enough to fully satisfy owner Lawrence Stroll.
Fernando Alonso has finished third in all three races so far in 2023. And team-mate Lance Stroll has scored strong points in two of them, and would likely have made it a hat-trick of top-10 finishes had he not suffered a problem with his energy recovery system.
This is a team which regularly struggled to get into the points at all last year. Now, Stroll's bullish predictions of future F1 glory don't seem so far away with Aston Martin challenging Mercedes and Ferrari to be the closest challengers to runaway leaders Red Bull.
Team principal Mike Krack is, understandably, over the moon with the progress made. But he is very aware that there is still a lot of work to be done, as owner Stroll is not going to be satisfied until regular race victories are being scored.
"The mission is very clear," said Krack after a very healthy 27-point haul in Melbourne last weekend. "[Stroll] has not been having any delay in telling us, 'When are we going to win the next one?' Obviously, he is happy we have made a step, but this is not enough for his ambitions.
"The good thing is with Lawrence is you know where you stand – he wants more, and we will have to deliver more." But even someone as ambitious as Stroll will know that the task of beating these Red Bulls is a monumental one.
Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez have won all three races between them and the performance gap of their RB19s compared to the machines of their rivals is significant. But Krack has seen enough from his own team to be confident that they can take advantage if the chasm narrows.
He added: "Three circuits with three characteristics. To be competitive on all three, we are confident we can be on other circuits as well. But you know the range of circuits is now very different – you have Baku with huge straights and then you have Monaco with no straights.
"These kinds of things will always shift the field a little bit and this can happen when you have such small margins, it can happen. It's the situation we are in and I've said it before, we have to be at maximum at all times, at 100% to get [the most] out of it."
