Aston Martin Runs into Roadblock Ahead of its F1 Return

Earlier in the year, Racing Point owner, Lawrence Stroll had purchased a 25% stake in Aston Martin and further invested $298 million in the brand. Stroll later confirmed that he would rebrand the current Racing Point F1 team into Aston Martin F1, which would make its debut in 2021. While Aston Martin may be ready to enter F1 in 2021, their new factory certainly isn’t.

Opening of the new Aston Martin factory pushed back to 2022

Aston Martin’s (Racing Point’s) team principal, Otmar Szafnauer was in conversation with Motorsport.com. He said, “The factory is still happening. We will build it as we need to. For competitiveness reasons, for the fact that we are going to be Aston Martin, for the fact that this place (current factory) has been up since 1990 and we’ve outgrown it. The only thing is that coronavirus has kind of shifted it sideways from a time perspective, quite a bit. We weren’t able to do much.”

“So we had a decision to make to shift the date when we were going to occupy the new factory. Either by the three or four months we’ve been delayed since early March, or just delay it by an entire year. August is the right time to move in, because it is traditionally the summer break. We were going to move in August of 2021 and we’re just going to shift that by a year and move in August 2022.” Otmar added.

Szafnauer said that they’ll make use of the delay, by working on plans to cut costs and take precautions to deal with the virus, in the long run.

Szafnauer also gave fans some insight into the new factory. He said, “The design team will be located here and there will be a hub and marketing centre too. You may even be able to come here and look at the F1 team as well as configure your new road car. It’ll be a nice campus for Aston Martin.”