Aston Martin have had a reasonably difficult first half of the season, with the former Racing Point team slipping to seventh in the Constructor's Championship as their AMR21 lost quite a bit of speed relative to the competition over the winter. But the team have made notable improvements as the season has progressed, with Performance Director Tom McCullough stating that there hasn't been any significant decline in pushing their 2021 performance updates. “It was and is a more or less never-ending process of iterative development," McCullough told the official Formula 1 website. "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. "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." Having finished second on the road in Hungary, before a later disqualification due to the lack of a mandatory fuel sample, Sebastian Vettel's second podium finish of the season showed the team's progress, according to McCullough. “It is working," he said. "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. "That's the result of a carefully managed programme of aero improvement that has necessarily involved trial and error but has also delivered real results. “It has been a very impressive body of work, and I salute my colleagues for it." McCullough explained that Vettel has also come on leaps and bounds since the start of the season. “Our new boy Sebastian, was at first disadvantaged by his initial unfamiliarity with the way our car operates and feels, then by the unreliability that he suffered in the pre-season test in Bahrain," he added. “But he has worked very diligently since then, in our simulator at the factory and at the circuits, to help us analyse our previous races with a view to preparing for our upcoming races in the best way possible.”
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