INTERVIEW: How Adrian Newey plans to change Aston Martin’s fortunes

At Red Bull, Newey appeared locked in for life, so his decision to leave the team last year after 19 seasons caused a stir. Was his exit from F1 for good, or would another team lure him away from sailing around the Mediterranean on his yacht?

Newey was linked with Ferrari, potentially joining forces with Lewis Hamilton, a driver he said he had always wanted to work with. Instead, it was Aston Martin that reeled him in, becoming a vital piece of a title-challenging puzzle constructed by owner Lawrence Stroll that has seen the construction of a new state-of-the-art factory, wind tunnel, and the hiring of many other high-profile staff in recent years.

Due to an extensive period of gardening leave, Newey did not join Aston Martin until 3^rd March, two months after the final draft of the 2026 technical regulations were released to the teams on 1^st January by the FIA. Even before then, however, the brightest brains in the other F1 teams had already started work in their anticipation of what was to come.

Newey concedes "99 per cent" of his focus over the past three months has been spent on the 2026 car, designed to far-reaching rules that include a new power unit, running on 100 per cent sustainable fuel, and associated aerodynamics.

For a man renowned for designing via old-fashioned pen and pencil rather than CAD, the pressure is on Newey to deliver.

"When I started, very little work had been done on the '26 research," said Newey. "Some had, of course, which was useful. But we've done a huge amount since.

"It's a big challenge, and deadlines are coming up very quickly. It's funny, when I started at McLaren on 1^st August [1997], again in the year before a big regulation change, then the pressure was similar to hit deadlines for a car that came out in February.

"This time we started very early in March, and the pressure is every bit as big. The lead times are much longer because the cars are more complicated. They take longer to design and manufacture, and the research tools are much more sophisticated, so you've got more to look at and research in terms of what that design will be.

"So, 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 the season, so front and rear suspension layout, length of the fuel tank, wheelbase, and all that sort of thing that we're working hard on.”

"In truth, we don't have enough time, and our simulation tools are a bit weak so we've got to make the best judgment on that. And if we can get those right, then the bodywork and things — if it comes to it, you can try to develop through the year."

As to the inroads Newey can make on Aston Martin's rivals, that remains to be seen, given their head start. "The rules came out more or less in final form, on 1^st January," he said. "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. So starting, at the very least four months later than that, you're always chasing, playing catch up. But it is what it is."

Despite the considerable sums of money pumped into Aston Martin by Stroll and his consortium of investors, Newey has spotted areas of concern, one of which he feels could have a considerable impact on the team's Championship aspirations.

Although declaring the team to be "very welcoming" and "easy to settle into," it has not taken him long to decipher its weak points and instigate a plan to address those.

"I think it's fair to say that some of our tools are weak, particularly the driver-in-the-loop simulator," said Newey. "They are used in two ways. One is as a research tool, and you're looking at how we're going to design the following year's car, how you're going to put all the tools together to better model it.

"The other, of course, is how you typically develop the setup of the car, especially for race weekends, so we're going to be a bit blind on that for some time. We've just got to try to use experience and best judgment. How successful that will be, time will tell.”

"It needs a lot of work because it's not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool, and not having that is a limitation. We've got to work around it in the meantime and then sort out a plan to get it to where it needs to be, but that's probably a two-year project, in truth."

The other area of focus for Newey, unsurprisingly, is all the new hires. Whilst the strengthening of the workforce was always a necessity to challenge the likes of Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes, the rapid rate of growth has resulted in a lack of cohesiveness.

"There are a lot of individually very, very good people," said Newey. "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 that was Jordan, that became Force India, that became Racing Point.

"It was, as such, always a small but slightly over-performing team, to now in a very short space of time becoming a very big team that, in truth, this year has been under-performing. A lot of that is now just getting everybody to settle down and learn how to extract the most out of the individuals."

There is no doubt Newey is very much invested in the Aston Martin project. Before his first appearance at a track in green, at the Monaco Grand Prix at the end of May, he had only enjoyed one weekend off.

Newey is going all out. "It's been pretty much full on since I started in March," he said. "My wife says I go into a design trance, and I can understand what she means, that when I get into a period of intense concentration, I tend not to see left and right.

"All my processing power is going into one area, which is trying to design a fast racing car."

Aston Martin could do with that in 2026. Its decline over the past two years is evident. Fernando Alonso scored eight podiums in 2023 — six of those in the first eight races — to help the team finish fifth in the Constructors' Championship with 280 points.

Although it finished fifth again last year, it scored just 94 points. At this stage, nine races into its fifth season as Aston Martin and lying ninth in the Constructors' standings, there is every likelihood it will accrue its lowest points total.

Whilst Aston Martin's future fortunes do not rest on the shoulders of one man, all eyes are certainly on Newey to see if he can work his magic again.

Images courtesy of Getty Images.