Aston Martin have signed Adrian Newey’s former Red Bull colleague Giles Wood to help improve the team’s simulation tools, it has emerged.

It comes after Newey described the team’s simulation tools as “weak” during his recent appearance at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Aston Martin snap up Adrian Newey ally to drive simulation improvements

Newey officially joined Aston Martin in the newly created role of managing technical partner ahead of the F1 2025 season, becoming a team shareholder in the process.

The 66-year-old stands as the most decorated individual in F1 history with involvement in more than 200 race wins and a combined 26 Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles for the likes of Red Bull, McLaren and Williams.

The signing of Newey has been hailed as a major coup for Aston Martin and team owner Lawrence Stroll, raising hopes that the team could emerge as a title-contending force in the coming years.

Adrian Newey: Aston Martin’s ticket to the top of F1?

👉 Adrian Newey’s to-do list: The five most important Aston Martin tasks

👉 Explained: Adrian Newey’s job title and how Aston Martin’s technical structure will look

Newey is currently leading the development of Aston Martin’s car for next season, the first under the major F1 2026 regulation changes, working in conjunction with incoming engine partners Honda as well as team partners Aramco and Valvoline.

The F1 design guru made his first trackside appearance with his new team at last month’s Monaco Grand Prix, where he admitted that some of Aston Martin’s tools – including the crucial driver-in-the-loop simulator are “weak.”

Newey went on to concede that the simulator “needs a lot of work because it’s not correlating at the moment”, adding that steps to fix the simulation tools could take two years.

Aston Martin have responded to Newey’s concerns by securing the services of Wood, who has joined the team as simulation and vehicle modelling director.

Wood is regarded as a key ally of Newey’s, having followed the tech genius from McLaren to Red Bull in 2007 and played an instrumental role in the team’s success with Sebastian Vettel, who won four consecutive World Championships between 2010 and 2013.

After spells as chief engineer and head of simulation between 2007 and 2014, Wood spent three years with Red Bull’s Advanced Technologies division until 2017.

Wood then stepped away from F1-related activities to join Apple, working on autonomous technologies for the tech giant.

His move to Aston Martin, where he reunites with Newey, marks a return to F1 for the highly respected engineer.

Appearing in Monaco, where he was spotted inspecting the championship-leading McLaren MCL39 on the grid by PlanetF1.com’s on-the-ground reporter Thomas Maher, Newey spoke of the need for Aston Martin to work in a more “organised way” going forward after a rapid period of growth.

He said: “There’s a lot of individually very, very good people.

“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.”

Responding to Newey’s critique of the team’s weaknesses, team principal Andy Cowell admitted that Aston Martin require time to optimise the tools at their new state-of-the-art factory.

He told Sky F1: “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.

“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.”

More on Aston Martin drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll from PlaneF1.com

👉 Fernando Alonso news

👉 Lance Stroll news

Aston Martin currently sit eighth in the Constructors’ standings having scored 22 points across the first 10 races of the F1 2025 season.

The team went six races without a point, save for Lance Stroll’s fifth place in the Miami sprint race, between the Japanese and Monaco grands prix.

However, Aston Martin have shown improved pace since a major upgrade package was introduced at last month’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola.

Stroll’s team-mate, the two-time World Champion Fernando Alonso, has reached Q3 at the last four races and finally got off the mark by finishing ninth at his home race in Spain.

Alonso followed up that result with seventh place in Canada last weekend.

Read next: Fred Vasseur on alert as shock replacement emerges after Horner approach – report