Aston Martin hitting “aggressive targets” for 2022 F1 car development

Aston Martin are satisfied with the progress they are making with their new car for the 2022 Formula 1 season, which is being designed to new technical regulations.

The team’s CEO Otmar Szafnauer said they are “learning at a steep rate” with their simulator programme but admitted they won’t be able to tell how well they are doing until their car runs on-track against the competition next year.

“It’s really, really hard to tell because you don’t know what the other teams have found and they’re very guarded secrets,” he said.

“What I can say is we set ourselves aggressive but achievable targets and we’re on track to meet those aggressive, achievable targets. We’re still finding good gains every week.”

Teams are expected to run together for the first time in a test at the Circuit de Catalunya next year. The test, which is now expected to cover three days, will be followed by another at the Bahrain International Circuit ahead of the season-opening race at the track.

“We will know in Bahrain or even Barcelona when we see what the others have done,” said Szafnauer. “It really is impossible to compare because like I say, perhaps the others have set aggressive targets too and they’re meeting them as well or exceeding them. And nobody will tell you.”

Aston Martin blamed changes in the technical regulations this year for its slump from its 2020 form, when it won a race and finished fourth in the championship as Racing Point. The team lies seventh in the standings with four races to go.

Szafnauer said the restrictions on development this year, and the need to prioritise work on its 2022 car, limited the progress it could make with its current design.

“Once the architecture was frozen and the changes were made there’s only so much you could do,” he said. “So we did our best to claw some of that back. But at the same time we also had to stop trying to claw the downforce back for 2021 because we have a limited amount of resource and limited amount of tunnel time, and we had to switch over to ’22 otherwise, it would have impacted our ’22 season as well.

“So would we have liked to have done better, yes, but we’re realistic that we couldn’t really claw back with the limited resources that we have. And you’ve got to remember the architecture was frozen. There’s lots of things [that] with an unfrozen architecture we could have tried, but you couldn’t. We had those two [development] tokens to use, and that was it.”

Which teams stand to gain the most from F1’s radical overhaul of its technical regulations in 2022? Read our analysis in the new edition of the RacingLines column today on RaceFans

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

2021 F1 season

• Verdict on error in GT race suggests Mercedes would have lost 2021 Abu Dhabi GP appeal
• Title ‘stolen’ from Mercedes made us ‘underdogs people cheer for’ – Wolff
• Red Bull Racing spent £230m during Verstappen’s title-winning 2021 campaign
• ‘I can’t box?’: Hamilton and Verstappen’s 2021 Abu Dhabi GP radio transcript
• Abu Dhabi’s legacy one year on: How the controversial 2021 finale changed F1

Browse all 2021 F1 season articles