Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough has revealed that the team will shift their development focus onto 2022 after the summer break.
The team have had an up and down campaign in their first season since rebranding, with Sebastian Vettel picking up their sole podium at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
After 11 races, they sit seventh in constructors’ championship, with the disqualification of Vettel from second at the recent Hungarian Grand Prix proving costly.
However, the Aston Martin team are positive about the progress they have made since the start of the year, with McCullough claiming they have improved every “visible” area of the AMR21.
“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,” he 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.”
Despite the progress Aston Martin have made, McCullough confirmed that following the summer break, their full focus would turn to the 2022 car given the importance of getting the new regulations right.
“It has been a very impressive body of work, and I salute my colleagues for it,” he said. “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.”