Mike Krack has downplayed expectations of an Aston Martin revival despite the team securing its first points of the season in Imola.

After three dreadful flyaways race weekends which saw the Silverstone based team remain anchored to the back of the field, Aston Martin finally got on the board at Imola, with Sebastian Vettel carving his way through the field to finish eighth after starting from 13th, whilst Lance Stroll just kept Alex Albon at bay for 10th, moving Aston Martin off the foot of the constructors' table.

But in spite of the team's excellent result, Krack, when speaking to MotorLAT and other selected media at the end of the race, sounded sceptical about the team’s chance of repeating the feat at the inaugural Miami Grand Prix in a fortnight.

“I don’t think there is much more pace in the car than previously, maybe a little bit if you look carefully into the sprint yesterday; we were having to defend hard; there was no chance to finish in the top 10 yesterday, and as I said in mixed conditions or in difficult conditions is where we thought we need to use our chances as much as we can and I think in a normal dry race it would have been very difficult for us.”

“We are happy obviously that we managed in difficult conditions on Friday and today to bring the car back in a better shape than it is by pace, so I think the drivers and the team did a very good job there in timing their stops right, in putting into action what we have learnt from yesterday in dry running so all in all I am satisfied with the first points of the season. But we have a long way to go, obviously, so we smile today, and tomorrow, we work hard for the future.”

But Krack did give the team's fans reasons to be hopeful as the German believes that by the time Formula 1 returns to Europe for the Spanish Grand Prix held in late May, the team will be in better shape; but he remained coy on when the team would bring a significant upgrade package.

“I think in a couple of races we’ll be in a better shape, it would be foolish to say in race x or race y because even if you bring new parts on, you always need to understand them, and you need to understand what job you have done so let’s say for example we bring a big package to Miami, and we know there is rain or whatever, and we don’t make it work.  So you create a lot of expectation, and then everybody will have considered that you’ve failed.”

“Take the Sprint here; we only have one session on Friday, you bring a big update, and you have no chance at all to test it or to validate if it works or not, so from that point of view, I think it’s very important not to say a specific event, especially to the outside world I mean we have our internal plans, but you will understand that I don’t want to go into detail there, but I think in a couple of races we should be in better shape.

"For us, we want to bring updates to every race, so we want to have continuous development and bring updates all the time; sometimes they’re a bit bigger, sometimes they’re a bit smaller, but it’s important to keep the development alive. Obviously, at some point in the season, we have to stop and focus on next year’s car, but we are quite far from that at the moment.”