Adrian Newey’s first month at Aston Martin is behind him, but Fernando Alonso believes his impact on this year’s AMR25 will be minimal.

Newey left Red Bull’s F1 team last year and joined the Aston Martin squad in early March 2025. As the designer of some of the sport’s most dominant cars, the potential impact of his arrival could be huge for Aston Martin’s competitiveness, but such leaps may have to wait until the new regulation cycle kicks in next season.

Fernando Alonso: Adrian Newey is focused on next year

Newey’s role at Aston Martin is in a far-reaching, bespoke capacity as managing technical partner, as well as taking on a shareholding position in the team.

His arrival coincides with the team completing its infrastructure overhaul at its Silverstone technology campus, including the coming online of its brand-new, state-of-the-art wind tunnel and simulator facilities.

But, with F1 heading into the final months of the current chassis and engine regulations, Newey’s impact isn’t likely to be felt to any great extent this year as all teams – not just Aston Martin – shift focus to the potentially far more rewarding gains to be made in the early stages of the revolutionary ruleset incoming for F1 2026.

Newey is a proven asset for major rule changes, with his dominant Williams designs through the 1990s following him over to McLaren in 1998 when the sport moved to narrow-track cars with grooved tyres.

In 2009, Newey’s Red Bull started life following initially quicker designs from Brawn GP and Toyota at the start of another major rules reset but, by the end of that initial season, his car was the quickest and, over the next four years, Sebastian Vettel took four straight championship wins as the Milton Keynes-based squad also landed the Constructors’ Championships.

With Aston Martin’s AMR25 a solid upper-midfield car, there isn’t likely to be much push to try transforming it into a world-beater due to the diminishing returns offered by developing it too much over the remaining 22 races, and Fernando Alonso says he doesn’t believe Newey is throwing much by way of new thinking into the current car.

“I’m not sure. I think he’s more focusing into next year’s car,” he told the media in Japan when asked about Newey’s potential impact on the AMR25.

“But I’m sure that he’s just following the races and the meetings at the factory, and obviously you cannot be completely away from this year’s car.

“I’m not aware of any big, big ideas coming from Adrian for this year’s car because, as I said, he’s focused on next year.

“But I’m sure that, here and there, he is having conversations trying to improve the car.”

More on Adrian Newey in F1

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

👉 Five reasons why Adrian Newey’s big-money Aston Martin move makes sense

Fernando Alonso: AMR25’s strengths and weaknesses remain the same

With two retirements from the first two Grands Prix, Alonso is yet to get off the mark in terms of points as teammate Lance Stroll has landed all 10 of the team’s scoring in its current seventh-place position.

The two-time F1 World Champion believes the “picture of the season” for his team will be in attempting to maximise every opportunity by trying to achieve perfection – the only way he sees points being possible.

“There are some positives, for sure, but some things to fix as well in the car,” he said of the AMR25.

“I think we’ve been more competitive, probably, in China than in Australia, but, in both races, we were fighting for points, which is more or less the same situation as we finished last year in Abu Dhabi.

“The picture didn’t change much, just the teams are just closer together. So we need to maximise everything on the car, on the setup, on the strategy – everything has to be perfect every weekend if we want to score points and I think that will be the picture for the remainder of the season.”

Elaborating on the characteristics of the car, the Spaniard said a wider dataset is needed on a greater range of circuits to get a clearer understanding but, from what he can feel, the same characteristics, strengths and weaknesses remain.

“Maybe just reduces the window of operation of the car, in a way,” he said, “and we try to tackle some of the inconsistencies that we had last year, from track to track, and even from lap to lap – I think that’s better this year.

“I think we have a car that we can trust more, and we can experiment a little bit with the setups and have the results that we want.

“But probably slow-speed corners is still a weakness of last year’s car and this year’s car, and, at the moment, Australia, China – Sector 2 is okay.

“I think, hopefully here in Japan, Sector 1 will be good, but it’s going to be a real test for us – maybe Bahrain or Monaco or this kind of circuit.”

This championship is super long, and we saw last year, I think Alpine started the season dead last, and even we lapped them for the first two or three races, and they were fighting for sixth and fifth at the end of the year. So yeah, anything can happen.

Over 24 races, we have to finish the season strong. The last two years, we started quite good and then we fell behind and we finished the season a little bit less competitive, in a way.

“We want to do the opposite this year and finish the season strong. I’m still confident that we can still fight for fifth at the end of the year. To be in that position, we need to improve, and that’s the aim.

Read Next: Yuki Tsunoda receives Perez and Gasly advice ahead of Red Bull debut