In recent months, Aston Martin has worked to effectively reverse engineer components developed for next year and then fitted them to the current AMR23, with the floor an area of focus.
But amid a decline in results for a team that scored a podium in six of the opening eight races, during the recent United States and Mexican Grands Prix weekends, it split drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll between old and new floor specifications to conduct real-world back-to-back testing.
During those rounds, the team banked only six points before cherry-picking components for the most recent Brazilian GP, when Fernando Alonso pipped Sergio Perez to return to the podium in third place.
Two-time champion Alonso admits that those "experiments" were "painful" to endure. He said: "We had to experiment a little bit on a few things on the car to really understand the direction that we were going, and we have to go for next year's car as well.
"So, those races were painful, especially Mexico. I think we were very slow as a team."
Ahead of the final two rounds of the season in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi, Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough now acknowledges that it was a mistake for the team to carry out so much research and development in public.
Source: Autosport