With the current regulations, the biggest challenge teams had to face in the development of 2021 cars was trying to make up for the significant loss of downforce.

"It dropped to about 30 points of aero load off, which we're about to recover," Eggington told RacingNews365.

"But that was not a surprise, because the discussion about which parts of the car were going to be modified was debated at length in a very good way."

AlphaTauri's Technical Director is pleased with the work the team has put into it.

"So everyone was doing their homework providing feedback and we arrived at a solution. We've been working hard to recover it. We believe we've done a good job of recovering it, probably similar to the majority of teams."

They are now working on collecting and correlating data. 

"Our launch car was developed in our Bicester wind tunnel, and now we've moved to the Bedford wind tunnel, we're going to be developing the car in that tunnel. So there's baselining needed. We're busy gathering data now. But first, thoughts are that we've recovered most of it."

Quantifying precisely how much deficit has been recovered is quite difficult. 

"Most of it is, but you know it's far more complex. There's a lot of metrics, which define what your aero is, and the amount of aero recovery across the speed range varies a bit, but in some areas, we probably have recovered all of it," explained Eggington. 

"But we've got to go through the numbers really and see what we measure on track. You know, I know what the CFD tells us, I know what the wind tunnel tells us, we have to measure, but I think we've pulled most of it back. But then on top of that, but we've work to do on specific sensitivities and recover some particular characteristics of the car that's potentially been damaged."

"But also, it's not just the case of developing the bits of the car the regulations have forced you to develop, everything else has to develop in reaction to the changes you made on the bits of the car, we've got a new nose, we've got a new front suspension, we've got a new front wing, we've got to navigate around that and see whether that's given us all of the benefits we predicted it would."

"So long story short, at this moment, I'll commit to saying we've recovered most of it, but I'll do some number crunching to see exactly where we are."