Sebastian Vettel says 2022 will be benchmark for Aston Martin's F1 progress

Sebastian Vettel has said that 2022 will be a ‘true test’ of the progress Aston Martin has made as a team and an indicator of how they stack up to the rest of the field.

2021 was a fairly difficult year for the team that rebranded from Racing Point, with the aerodynamic changes between ’20 and ’21 hampering them.

Indeed, they opted to start developing for 2022 early on last season and the hope has to be that they have therefore aced the far greater set of rule changes that are coming in for the new campaign.

Certainly, Vettel is intrigued to see how things are going to unfold and thinks this year will be a more accurate representation of where they are as an outfit:

“I think at this stage everybody’s hoping to be at the top.

“If you look at the podium it will still look the same this year so there’s only space for one, but we hope we are in much better shape than last year.

“We have the ability this year to develop the car – we didn’t do that last year for probably more than three-quarters of the season – so it will be very different. Obviously last year we knew from the start that it’s going to be a long and difficult season so we hope for a better one.

“The truth is the team is growing, obviously having a shuffle in management is always a bit of a hiccup or shake-up and will take time to overcome, but hopefully we manage to pull together and despite growing in size becoming leaner or more efficient in our processes.

“I think this year will be a true test for us and we’ll see how good we are because as I said last year we couldn’t show anything because we didn’t focus on bringing any updates, whereas this year it’s all about this set of regulations, this generation of cars and we will be able to show what we can produce