Aston Martin team boss Otmar Szafnauer says the Silverstone-based outfit is on track to meet its "aggressive" 2022 targets, and finding theoretical gains "every week" for its future contender.
F1 teams' designers and engineers are hard at work developing the new-spec cars that will hit the track next year and that are being conceived to the sport's new regulations.
Aston Martin is not only focused on its 2022 car, the British outfit is also tackling a significant restructuring with an expansion of its human resources and a new 400,000 square feet factory that has broken ground and which is expected to come online late next year or in early 2023.
"What I can say is we set ourselves aggressive but achievable targets and we’re on track to meet those aggressive and achievable targets and we’re still finding good gains every week," explained Szafnauer.
"But compared to the others it’s impossible [to know], so really we will know in Bahrain or even in Barcelona [testing] when we know what others are done. It really is impossible to compare.
"Perhaps the others have set aggressive targets too and they’re meeting them or exceeding them, nobody will tell you."
Against the backdrop of its multi-front evolution, Aston Martin's results have disappointed this season.
The team which has built itself a reputation of being the most cost-efficient outfit on the grid has lingered in F1's midfield, weighed down by its unfavorable low-rake design and the very limited budget assigned to the development of its AMR21.
"Once the architecture was frozen and the changes were made there’s only so much you can do," said Szafnauer.
"We did our best to claw some of that back but at the same time we had to stop trying to claw the downforce back for 2021 as we had limited amount of resource and limited amount of [wind] tunnel time and we had to switch over to ‘22 otherwise it would have impacted our ‘22 season as well.
"Would we have liked to have done better? Yes, but we’re realistic that we couldn’t really claw it back with the limited resource we have, and you’ve got to remember the architecture was frozen.
"There’s lots of things with an unfrozen architecture we could have tried but we couldn’t, we had those two [development] tokens to use and that was it."
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