Life after Sebastian Vettel begins for Aston Martin in just a few weeks, though now they have another celebrated former Formula 1 champion leading their charge on the track.
Fernando Alonso may be the oldest man on the grid but he remains young at heart. And he was so desperate to secure his long-term place in the sport that he left the Renault stable for the second time in his career to take on this new challenge.
Part of the package at Aston Martin involves parroting those lines we keep hearing from their ambitions owner Lawrence Stroll about their ambition. But no amount of talk will push this team any closer to the front of the grid.
Whether or not Alonso genuinely believes in the Aston Martin cause is something we can only speculate about. A cynic might suggest he has put his desire for career longevity – Alpine were only offering a one-year deal – over his chances of podiums and maybe even adding to his F1 win tally.
There is no doubting his competitiveness, though. Alonso will tirelessly push for the team to get better and give him a more competitive car, which can only help the team on their quest. It will, however, be interesting to see how he gets along, if at all, with Lance Stroll.
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Alonso has always been a combative figure and no stranger to a team-mate scuffle. That infamous 2007 season battling with Lewis Hamilton is the obvious example, though the way his partnership with Esteban Ocon ended last season shows he's still prepared to thrown down if he feels it's needed.
Lance Stroll has a new Aston Martin team-mate this year (Getty Images)What he has to bear in mind this time is that his team-mate is the owner's son. As I learned when I was usurped as the starting goalkeeper of my Sunday league football team as a 10-year-old by the gaffer's kid, family ties tend to come out on top over experience and talent. I'm definitely not still bitter...
Perhaps Alonso was considering that – the identity of his team-mate, not my pre-teen footballing woes – when he gave an unexpectedly measured reaction to the collision he had with Stroll in Austin last year, which almost flipped the Spaniard's Alpine. He is usually content to speak his mind, but on this occasion insisted it was just "an unfortunate racing incident".
Aston Martin come into the 2023 season off the back of an uninspiring seventh-placed finish last time out. Vettel won the lion's share of their points so they will need Alonso to plug that gap. But what they really need is a car which can, at the very least, propel them back up the standings to fight again for fourth place as they were doing when branded as Racing Point just a few years ago.
Are Lawrence Stroll's ambitions for Aston Martin realistic? (Getty Images)Part of the strategy to achieve that, it seems, is their hefty recruitment spree. Several top engineers and technicians have been brought in, many from the top three teams, with the headline move being the signing of Dan Fallows from Red Bull, who is now Aston's technical director.
Red Bull may not miss him too much as his departure meant they could promote the highly-rated Enrico Balbo to the chief aerodynamicist job, but he could mean a lot to his new employer. Eyebrows were raised when Aston debuted a new car design midway through last season which looked a lot like the RB18, but Fallows insists he had nothing to do with that.
What he will be able to do, in a less obvious way, is take what he did at Red Bull and learned during so many years working under Adrian Newey and use it to propel an underachieving team closer to where they want to be. Whether 2023 will be the year in which they can do that remains to be seen.
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