The Aston Martin F1 Team will stop developing its 2021 car and shift focus to their 2022 challenger, the team’s performance director, Tom McCullough, has revealed.
The newly rebranded team had a difficult pre-season test and struggled in the opening few races of 2021, but they have steadily made their way up the order and are now much closer to the midfield.
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Discussing the lengths Aston Martin have gone to in order to improve this year’s package, McCullough revealed that every “externally visible part” of their car has been tweaked or updated since pre-season testing.
“It was and is a more or less never-ending process of iterative development, and, as a result, there is almost no externally visible part of our car that has not been improved in some way between Bahrain and Silverstone,” McCullough said.
“Or, to put it another way, if a part of our car is licked by the wind, we have probably updated it at some point over the past four months. It is working.
“We know that our car is still not the fastest, but it is now closer in performance to the cars of our principal rivals than it was at the beginning of the season, and that is the result of a carefully managed programme of aero improvement that has necessarily involved trial and error but has also delivered real results.”
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He also revealed that the team will shift its focus to 2022, when sweeping regulation changes will come into effect, after Formula 1’s summer break.
“It has been a very impressive body of work, and I salute my colleagues for it,” McCullough added.
“However, like almost all the teams, after the summer shutdown we will transfer that effort and resource to the task of making our 2022 car as competitive as possible.”
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