Why Aston Martin has “no place to hide” in Barcelona after Monaco GP point

Aston Martin Formula 1 chief trackside officer Mike Krack says that there will be “no place to hide” at this weekend's Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix. 

After a well-executed race and helped by retirements and penalties for others, Fernando Alonso was eventually classified P10 at the Monaco Grand Prix to score the struggling Aston Martin team's first point of a troubled 2026 F1 season. 

However, Krack acknowledged that on its return to a traditional track where power unit and chassis performance are both critical the Silverstone-based eam expects to struggle.

“It will be very tough in Barcelona,” Krack told media including Crash.net. “There is no place to hide, and after Barcelona, normally when you bring upgrades, you know where you are, or after Barcelona is normally a reality check for your pace.

“We know that we need to be aware of that, and we have to try and execute without any mistakes, try to get the maximum learning from it.

“I think for the drivers will be the toughest, because we know that Barcelona is very hard on your package and there will be not so much they can do about it.

“So I think we need to protect them maybe a little bit from getting too much negative out of this, because there's nothing they can do about it.”

He also cautioned that while the Monaco point was welcome, it was not a cause for celebration given the bigger picture of poor performance.

“With all the penalties, it turned out three and a half hours after the chequered flag that we had the point,” he said. “And I think it is not something to lean back or to celebrate too much.

“But I think it was a very good reward for the hard work that everybody has put in since the beginning of the season, because it has been quite tough, you can believe me, and I think it is. It is like a moment of relief for everyone in Sakura, in Silverstone, at the track. So that was quite good.”

Although misfortune for others helped Alonso into the top 10, Krack confirmed that the team had worked hard to put itself in a position to benefit.

“Monaco was a tough weekend for us,” he said. “We had more issues than we were expecting over the course of the days. I think we thought we would be a little bit more competitive, from the character of the track.

“But we could not manage to get that performance out of the car, so we started basically from the back with not a good performance.

“I think what was clear from the beginning and from the whole weekend is that we sat down and we said, ‘How are we going to approach this?’ Because Monaco race is not about performance. Monaco race is about track position, and trying to gain track position.

“We saw a lot of issues in free practice with pit limiter infringements and all these kinds of things, so we knew there could be penalties. I think the nice thing was that we spoke about all these things, and we said we need to keep it clean as much as we can, and if we can keep it clean, there is maybe a chance to get a good result.

“We did not speak about points. That is what happened. I think there is a certain amount of luck involved in all this, because you have to have the safety cars, and the red flags to come back to the lead lap.”

Krack noted that the having realised that pit lane speeding could be an issue on race day the team made allowances to avoid being caught out.

"We took more margin, that's the reality,” he said. “Every team tunes up its pit speed limit over the weekend. We saw that the pit lane was very bumpy from the beginning, much more than usual. When they built the track I think there was some of the cranes that did not use the plates, so when you see the cars going down the pit lane, it was very, very bumpy.

“And we were concerned about pit limit control, and then we had also an infringement on Friday, a small one. We just decided this could go wrong in the race, let's take a bit more margin.”

Krack also acknowledged that Lance Stroll’s crash in the race was caused by the PU pushing him in the corners.

While the Canadian himself didn’t blame the gravel from the track breaking up, Krack believes it did also contribute.

“We asked the drivers to go with the lowest possible gears on the track,” he said. “Obviously for boost, for re-gen, just to have to have the engine in a better place, and the energy as well. And we kept telling the drivers, and they kept telling us we cannot, because the drivability is not good enough.

“So we had a situation where we were quite stable, and then Lance tried also to go into first to see what we get, and he got another of what he describes as kick feeling like, a push feeling, which put him offline.

“But at this point, and we speak centimetres here, when you look at the onboard, you can see that there were stones on the on the tyres, and then there was nowhere to go, like with Charles [Leclerc] as well.

“I think considering the feeling that he had the beginning of the race that is why he concluded it is power unit related, or engine related. We think that we have a lot of work to do on the gearbox going forward, and we think that this might be the first origin of the issue.”