Given the opportunity to highlight any strength of Aston Martin’s AMR25, Lance Stroll could come up with one.

That blunt assessment of Aston Martin‘s 2025 challenger comes at a time when the team is resisting any temptation to pull their recently-arrived F1 design guru Adrian Newey away from F1 2026, to try help boost their current car.

Aston Martin AMR25 lacking strengths: Can Adrian Newey deliver for F1 2026?

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

A regular visitor to the podium in 2023, such results have dried up for Aston Martin since, with F1 2025 not yet producing a change in fortunes.

Stroll has scored all 10 of Aston Martin’s points across the opening four rounds, placing the team P7 in the early Constructors’ Championship standings.

And ahead of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Stroll was quizzed on whether the AMR25 is at least a more comfortable car to drive compared to its predecessor, the AMR24, which last season collected 94 points.

“Not particularly!” Stroll replied and laughed in conversation with the media, including PlanetF1.com.

“I would love to say yes, but there’s still definitely a lot of areas to work on.”

And when asked by PlanetF1.com what strengths the AMR25 does have, Stroll could not think of one.

“I don’t think so,” he replied as his initial pause prompted a further ‘any at all’ question on the car’s strengths. “I don’t think there’s any real strengths.

“We’re not the quickest car in a high-speed corner, we’re not the best car in low-speed traction.

“Maybe in straight-line braking, we’re quite okay. Turn 1 in Bahrain was our best corner I would say last weekend.”

Put to him that this would make Monza a better track for Aston Martin, Stroll agreed: “Yeah, somewhere like that. Where there’s a lot more lap time rolling through the corner and getting on the power.”

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With Stroll struggling to pinpoint a clear strength of the AMR25, team-mate Fernando Alonso has uncovered “low-speed corners” as a weakness, which he hopes will be negated somewhat this weekend in Jeddah.

Asked if the high-speed, high-adrenaline Jeddah Corniche Circuit should better suit Aston Martin, Alonso responded: “Yeah, hope so.

“I think the first couple of weekends have been not easy for us, some challenges with the new car. But I think the high-speed content should be a little better for us. So yeah, we really hope for a better weekend.

“We’re still actually discovering a little bit the car and some of the weaknesses. I would say that the first four Grands Prix, the low-speed corners were probably our weakest part of the track. But there are some concerns as well of bouncing and other stuff that we are facing from time to time.

“So yeah, we are working hard on improving those. And as I said, here there’s super high grip, a lot of high-speed corners, so all in all, should be a better weekend.”

As for whether Aston Martin can see a quick fix for those low-speed gremlins, Alonso clarified: “I think in Formula 1 there is never a quick enough fix to solve your problems. Competitors are strong, they are also improving their cars and [fixing] their problems. And it’s always a race off-track to get the car better and better.

“But yeah, I think we have a couple of ideas. Some of those have to do with the set-up that we could try on the weekends as well. And yeah, here we have stable weather conditions, so let’s try to use FP1, FP2, FP3 to maximise the track time and learn about the car.”

That being said, with a complete overhaul to the regulations coming for F1 2026, Alonso confirmed that generating momentum going into next season is less of a priority than it was for F1 2025.

Smaller, lighter cars will hit the grid for F1 2026, powered by new engines featuring a 50/50 split between electrical power and an internal combustion engine utilising fully-sustainable biofuels. It is from that year when Aston Martin will begin their collaboration with new engine partner Honda.

“Less important. Less important than last year,” said Alonso to that idea of momentum building for F1’s new era, “because this year’s cars are a continuation of last year’s. The last race in Abu Dhabi… I don’t think that the results that we are seeing now are very different compared to Abu Dhabi and the first four races.

“So I think next year is a completely new set of regulations that completely reset what you learn this year. Maybe it’s not super useful for next year in terms of aerodynamics on the car.

“So yeah, obviously you always want to finish the season on a high and keep the motivation high for everybody. But I think the motivation in the team is super high anyway because, as we said many times, we have our wind tunnel now working since a few weeks ago, we have Adrian in the team, we have Honda coming, new regulations, so the motivation is really high.”

And so with that in mind, Newey – whose designs have contributed to a total of 26 F1 world titles – is focused entirely on the new rules for 2026, following his arrival in March as Aston Martin managing technical partner and shareholder.

When asked if there is any temptation to get Newey’s help on improving the current AMR25, Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell told the media, including PlanetF1.com: “100 per cent of Adrian’s designing time is focused on ’26.

“He joined in March, so there was a period of him getting up to speed with the regulations, up to speed with the concept work that we’ve been doing in the preceding couple of months. And there are some tough deadlines to meet for releasing monopod details, transmission details, and the cars are running earlier for the ’26 season.

“The test is at the end of January, so getting a car ready for that point requires a slightly earlier decision point. And clearly, everything’s new. There’s zero carryover. So there’s lots of work there, and Adrian has just been focused on that.”

Cowell concluded: “He’s focused largely on the tools that we’re using, rather than any direct performance aspect for the ’25 car.”

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