After what has been a rapid and thorough recruitment drive by Aston Martin, the team are finally applying the brakes on further signings, with the team preparing to live with the reduced budget cap.
Prior to Lawrence Stroll buying the team, Aston Martin (known formerly as Force India), were a team who incredibly applied pressure on the biggest teams in the sport, despite being one of the smallest and least-funded outfits in the paddock.
Fast forward to today and the picture couldn’t be any more different, with Stroll throwing money in all directions, to shape the Silverstone-based team into a future title contender.
Once their new windtunnel and factory are up and running, the team will arguably have the best facilities on the grid at their disposal, with the signing of Fernando Alonso also set to bring a sensational wealth of experience and a hunger to win to the side.
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The team has also been throwing a lot of money at new personnel, with former McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh and Red Bull’s former head of aerodynamics Dan Fallows having joined the team.
This, though, has all come at an incredible cost, with the side now having to slow down and start taking the 2023 budget cap of $135 million into consideration.
Aston Martin’s performance director Tom McCullough has confirmed that the team will be slowing their recruitment drive down, taking what they’ve learnt about the budget cap so far into consideration.
“Yeah, for sure, we’ve learned a lot with the regulations and the way that whole process has worked,” McCullough said.
“We saved quite a large development budget, knowing that this year [2022] would be a year that you’re going to need to spend some money on developing the car.
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“We obviously had quite a bit of margin to the cost gap when we’re setting all that out as we’re sort of growing. I think next year, it’s a guide path of the cost cap coming down, we’re growing as a team, so those challenges are going to be harder.
“We’ve been doing a lot of growing in the last couple of years with the idea of coming up to the cost cap, so I think we’re in quite a good place now, the size of the company. Still some recruitment going on, but it’s definitely slowed down compared to what it was.
“I think everyone learns regulations and interpretations of regulations, and I think people will be able to push a bit more. I’m sure there’s a lot of teams that have got a bit of margin at the end of the year, maybe more than they thought.”