“To beat Mercedes, you no longer have to be their customer”

The German brand has been powering the British team since 2009 when it was still called Force India. However, to keep the house of Mercedes firmly on top, the Greens had to find an engine manufacturer that would give them top priority.

As a result, Aston Martin creates a partnership as good as that between Red Bull and Honda, and intends to emulate it success story Austro-Japanese.

“At the moment we have a great partnership, and we have great equipment and systems provided to us by Mercedes, says Martin Whitmarsh, CEO of Aston Martin Performance Technologies. But our team is growing. We have sworn to ourselves to win in Formula 1, and that means defeating the existing partners and to do that, we have to free ourselves from them”.

“We are building better equipment, and we are gradually moving away from our dependence on Mercedes-Benz, adds the former McLaren legend. We do not reject them. They did a great job for us but we’re here to beat them, and that means we have to be on our own.”.

“They’re here to win, and obviously we’re here to win too, so at the end of the day there was a mismatch and that’s why we made this decision to team up with Honda.”.

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“If you want to win, that means beating Mercedes, and it’s very difficult to beat a top team like them if you rely on them for IP, equipment, features,…” adds Whitmarsh.