Adrian Newey is set to reach a fresh milestone at the Monaco Grand Prix as he attends his first race with Aston Martin.

And the F1 design legend will come armed with his iconic trusty notepad, though he explained that its contents are not all that exciting, “scraps of A4 paper” featuring “sketches, ideas, prompts” pretty much.

Adrian Newey notebook: Monaco GP to trigger ideas for Aston Martin success?

Newey has contributed to 26 F1 World Championship successes with his car designs, and Aston Martin’s managing technical partner will look to expand that incredible tally further in the years to come as the new chassis and engine regulations take effect from 2026.

And Newey’s notebook is not the only unique feature of the 66-year-old’s approach, as he also prefers taking an old school route with his design work.

“Much is made of me using a drawing board rather than a CAD system!” Newey noted in an Aston Martin interview.

“For me, personally, it’s like a language – my first language. I grew up on a drawing board; CAD systems really didn’t come of age until the 1990s. I can use CAD, at a basic level, but I’m going to be slower.

“If I have a drawing on the drawing board, with 100 lines on it, I’ve probably drawn 200 lines to get to that point and rubbed a hundred out. I change things as I develop an idea, and on the board I can have everything out there in front of me at a decent scale, rather than zooming into individual components, which is what you tend to do in CAD.

“My way of working has some plus-points – but also some minuses, probably the biggest one being that everything I do has to be translated. When I’m flat out, there are probably three people scanning my drawings and turning them into surfaces. If you had too many people in the organisation working with a drawing board, it would be very inefficient.

“Increasingly though, with parametric modelling in CAD systems, you can go straight into that. It’s developed a lot over the last decade and no doubt will continue to develop, and at some point, I’ll be on the wrong medium – but I think by then I’ll be retired.”

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The drawings continue in the trademark deep red notebook which Newey is always seen armed with when he wanders around the F1 grid.

And so, he was asked to divulge the details on what lays within.

“To be honest, the notebook doesn’t have much in it,” he said, “it’s just the holder for lots of scraps of A4 paper. Typically, those are sketches, ideas, prompts.

“It’s just a way of quickly getting down whatever’s ticking around in my head. It’s a way of developing ideas and then communicating them, though most of them are likely unintelligible to anyone else. Sometimes, if I can’t read my own writing, they’re unintelligible to me too!”

Newey began work with Aston Martin at the start of March, and as he beavers away at the F1 2026 rulebook – bidding to ensure Aston Martin come flying out of the blocks in this new era with their Honda engine – he will be trackside for the first time with the team at this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix.

As for why Monaco is the right place for his Aston Martin trackside debut rather than an earlier round, Newey explained: “The deadlines we have in modern F1 seem to be far earlier than they used to be 20 years ago, and there are a lot of them coming up for the 2026 car, which is where my concentration has been, so I’ve not been at the track.

“I plan to be in Monaco… With the notebook.”

Aston Martin sit P7 in the F1 2025 Constructors’ Championship standings, with 14 points on the board.

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