What we’ve learned from Adrian Newey’s first F1 outing with Aston Martin

Adrian Newey attended his first race in Aston Martin’s all-green uniform in Monaco, two and a half months into the job of Managing Technical Partner, which is an overarching position that will allow Newey to get involved in all technical aspects of the team as it aims to conquer the Formula 1 world over the next few years.

At Silverstone, Newey will encounter several other heavy hitters from F1’s technical elite, such as former Mercedes power unit chief Andy Cowell, who heads up the entire team, and former Ferrari designer Enrico Cardile, who is set to join in the summer as chief technical officer.

Aston’s technical leadership will be at the helm of a state-of-the-art factory across the road from Silverstone Circuit, including a brand-new wind tunnel which has just been deployed for the first time to help deliver in-season car upgrades.

When first quizzed by the F1 media in the Monaco Grand Prix paddock, Newey gave his view on the kind of team ambitious owner Lawrence Stroll has put together, and what it can achieve under the new regulations.

Newey’s first impressions, and the main weaknesses he has spotted

Getting the pleasantries out of the way swiftly, Newey was an open book on some of the weaknesses that Aston still has to overcome. As Stroll went on a recruiting spree to populate the new Silverstone base, not that long after its much leaner Racing Point days, he has noted Aston is still undergoing growing pains as the squad learns to operate efficiently.

“My first job has been, whilst designing and talking to everybody, to try and understand how the team works, its strengths and weaknesses, and work with the strengths and set out a plan to try and boost the weaknesses,” he explained.

“There are a lot of 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.

“It was always a small but slightly over-performing team, to now, in a very short space of time, a very big team that in truth has been underperforming this year. I think a lot of that is now just getting everybody to settle down and learn how to extract the most out of the individuals.”

On the hardware front, Newey was complimentary about what he called the best factory and wind tunnel in F1, but he has also identified one key weakness that must be addressed; the physical simulator that its race and reserve drivers use to both help develop new parts and trial set-ups over race weekends.

“I think it’s fair to say that some of our tools are weak, particularly the driver-in-the-loop simulator,” he disclosed.

“It needs a lot of work because it’s not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool. Not having that is a limitation, but we’ve obviously got to work around it in the meantime. That’s probably a two-year project, in truth. We’re going to be a bit blind on that for some time. We’ve just got to try to use experience and best judgement.”

How the 2026 rules provide scope for opportunity

At first glance the new 2026 rules – which Newey is “99%” focused on – are more prescriptive, but after a deeper dive Newey has unearthed a lot of scope for innovation, which might be an ominous sign for Aston Martin’s competition. That is mirroring his thoughts from when the 2022 ground-effect based regulations came in.

“It’s exactly the same,” he said. “When I first looked at the 2026 rules my first reaction was: ‘God, this doesn’t leave much.’ But then you start to drill into the detail and there is a reasonable amount of flexibility. Of course, I’d always like more, but there’s a reasonable amount of flexibility. So I’d imagine you’ll see some different solutions at the start of next year, and then everybody starts to converge.”

A late start means Newey is up against it to fully flex his muscle for 2026

With models already in the wind tunnel from the turn of the year as a ban on aerodynamic development was lifted, Newey also admitted his 3 March start date was later than he would have liked.

“The rules came out in their final form on the 1 January. I’m sure there was enough known about the regulations that a decent body of work could have been done, and no doubt was done by many teams prior to that,” he explained.

“So, starting at the very least four months later than that you’re always chasing and playing catch-up, but it is what it is.”

Yet he said a huge amount of work has already been done as Aston is targeting ambitious development deadlines, with Newey’s focus on what he called the “fundamentals” as the 2026 car layout is being defined.

“When I started, very little had been done on ’26 research, but we’ve done a huge amount since. It’s a big challenge, and I think deadlines are coming up very quickly,” he said.

“Lead times got much longer, because cars are more complicated and they take longer to design and manufacture, and the research tools are much more sophisticated.

“My main focus at the moment is working with everybody on what I call the fundamentals of the car, which are the bits of the car that you can’t change during a season, so front and rear suspension layout, length of the fuel tank, all that sort of thing.

“In truth, we don’t have enough time, and our simulation tools are perhaps a bit weak, so we’ve got to make the best judgements on that. If we can get those right, then the bodywork and wings, etc., if it comes to it, you can try to develop that through the year.”

How Newey is already helping the team in 2025

But other than wandering around with his notebook in Monaco and sitting in on engineering briefings, there are tangible ways Newey is contributing to this year’s development project, even if he is not directly working on the car.

CEO and team boss Cowell explained: “As he’s been working on the ’26 car, he gets to see the tools that we’ve got, specifically CFD, wind tunnel, the whole journey of information from a drawing board to wind tunnel results. And with that we learn about our strengths and weaknesses.

“This weekend he’ll see the way we operate in a race weekend environment. The way we optimise the car we’ve got, the way we play a different strategy, and so having his experience and insight, looking to see what’s going well, what’s not so well, just helps with our jobs list of what to work on to become a stronger team.

“Adrian’s seen a big chunk of the factory world, he’ll see the first race of the circuit world and it just helps link it all together. He’s probably one of the few engineers in the sport that can look at the whole aspect of the car. His experience, insight and creativity will help absolutely everybody in the team.”

But what is clear is that the man who was instrumental to championship success at Williams, McLaren and Red Bull is all-in again, unlike the end of his Red Bull tenure where he drifted in and out of the day-to-day picture.

“Very much so,” he nodded. “I had the weekend off two weeks ago, but other than that, it’s been pretty much full on since I started in March.

“My wife says I go into a design trance. When I get into this period of intense concentration and I tend to not see left and right, all my processing power is going into one area, which is trying to design a fast racing car…”