Aston Martin tinkers: "Hardly any visible part hasn't been improved".

Aston Martin hasn't really put a stop ahead compared to last year. Where last year they competed for fourth place with McLaren, this year Lawerence Stroll's team can only compete for fifth place with AlphaTauri and Alpine.

Aston Martin Performance director Tom McCullough tells Motorsport.com that almost every part of the car has undergone change this year. At the start of the season, the car was anything but ready and at the desired level.

"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 hasn't been improved in some way between Bahrain and Silverstone. Or, to put it another way, if any part of our car is licked by the wind, we've probably updated it at some point in the last four months."

Aston Martin making progress

Yet McCullough also sees progress with the team, despite them still not being where they want to be.

"We know that our car is still not the fastest, but it is now closer to our main rivals' cars in terms of performance than it was at the start 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 produced real results."

Still, Aston Martin will have secretly hoped for more beforehand. For this year there's no more in it than battling for fifth place in the Constructors' Championship.