Adrian Newey made his Grand Prix debut with Aston Martin at Monaco, giving media a chance to better understand his integration into the team and his thought processes as he starts work on the F1 2026 machine.

And according to the design legend, an uptick in performance for Aston will be a work in progress, as some of the team’s “tools are weak.”

Adrian Newey reveals Aston Martin “tools are weak”

Adrian Newey is still in his earliest stages at Aston Martin. He officially joined the team in March, at which point he got straight to work putting together a design for the team’s F1 2026 machine.

But this past weekend, at the Monaco Grand Prix, Newey stepped away from the drawing board to return to the Formula 1 paddock. There, he was spotted with his iconic notebook in hand, checking out the latest innovations from the competition.

At Monaco, Newey held an intimate interview session with select members of media where he outlined some of his early plans for the team — and where he set the record straight on what we could expect from Aston Martin in the near future.

To put it simply: Newey is asking for a few years before we really start judging the team’s overhaul.

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“It’s fair to say that some of our tools are weak,” he explained.

“Particularly the driver-in-the-loop simulator needs a lot of work because it’s not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool.”

Driver-in-the-loop (DIL) simulators are critical for Formula 1 teams in this era of extremely limited testing. Basically, these simulators are designed to replicate real-life racing conditions. Engineers have the ability to tweak weather, set-up, and other variables in order to create a realistic experience of an event.

Behind the wheel of the most state-of-the-art DILs, drivers are also subjected to accurate movements so they can ‘feel’ what the car is doing without actually needing to drive a car on the track.

Each Formula 1 team generally has a simulator driver who logs hour after hour in the factory each race weekend, trying out alterations that can then be sent to the team at the track itself. The goal is to find a comfortable but quick set-up for the team’s Grand Prix drivers on Sunday.

As such, accurate, correlational feedback is critical. If the DIL provides responses that aren’t happening in real life, one of the most critical tools in a race team’s repertoire has been made redundant — and it means the drivers will likely suffer in the Grand Prix.

According to Newey, this is what’s happening over at Aston Martin. The simulator drivers in the DIL experience specific responses and reactions with one setup, but when that same setup is used in the Grand Prix car, it reacts in a completely different way.

Though an inaccurate sim might seem like an easily solvable problem, state-of-the-art DIL simulators can start at around $5 million (£3.7 million) — and that’s before you factor in the cost of the building required to house it, the staff required to service it, and the resources required to power it. It can become a multi-billion dollar project in the blink of an eye.

So it makes sense, then, that Newey doesn’t want fans to expect a sudden turnaround from Aston Martin in 2026. The tools used to improve the race cars will require a “plan to get it where it needs to be, but that’s probably a two-year project in truth.”

Part of that plan will involve better organising the structure of the team.

“There’s a lot of individually very, very good people,” Newey explained.

“We just need to try to get them working together, perhaps in a slightly better organised way.

“That’s simply a result of the roots of the team at Jordan, that became Force India, that became Racing Point, and was as such always a small but slightly over-performing team, to now in a very short space of time a very big team that the truth is has been underperforming this year.”

It may be a long-term project, but if there’s anyone to transform a team, it’s Adrian Newey.

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