After Adrian Newey admitted that some of Aston Martin’s tools were ‘weak’ ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, team principal Andy Cowell has issued a response.

And more than anything, Cowell is pleased to have someone with Newey’s skill on the team — someone who has the experience to point out what’s great and what needs work.

Andy Cowell responds to Adrian Newey ‘weak tools’ comment

At the Monaco Grand Prix, Adrian Newey made his first trackside appearance as Aston Martin’s design lead, donning the team’s green attire and speaking to media.

It was in one of those conversations with media that Newey admitted the team has an uphill battle before it to truly find success in Formula 1.

“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. These simulators are designed to replicate real-life racing conditions, with the ability to tweak any number of variables to better replicate real-world conditions.

But according to Newey, the DIL produces dramatically different feedback compared to what the drivers are experiencing in reality — which means that Aston Martin will have to iron out those tools before it can truly find speed.

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.”

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Speaking to Sky Sports F1, Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell was asked about Newey’s assessment — and offered a candid response.

“I think whenever you create new equipment, it takes a while to commission it and then work out how well correlated either the DLS [Dynamic Lap Simulation] or the wind tunnel is with the real world here,” said Cowell.

“So you need to do some updates, bring it to the track, you need to see how everything matches up — that’s the correlation — and even experienced teams have problems with correlation, you hear it up and down the pit lane.”

One major example was Mercedes. In early 2024, as the team continued to struggle to find performance on the track, team boss Toto Wolff had to admit that his team was struggling with correlation issues.

While Aston’s concerns center around the simulator’s correlation to reality, Mercedes struggled to find a correlation between the data it was amassing in the wind tunnel and the actual performance of the cars on track.

Those correlation problems are frustrating and require time to solve, but they are by no means a death knell for a team’s performance — particularly when a person as skilled as Adrian Newey can point out early issues and move to resolve them.

“The great thing with Adrian is he’s coming in and saying what’s great,” Cowell explained.

“He’s setting the level that is really good, and so we’ve got to lift up to that and it’s work that we were already working on, but Adrian just helps refine the jobs list.”

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