Adrian Newey opens up on joining Aston Martin and how it is working in the new team, as he adds on 2026 work, driver feedback and potential return to F1 races.
Having been on the job for good number of weeks now, Newey has settled down in his role. The arrival greetings and know-how period is done, as serious work on the 2026 car has kicked-in. The large focus of the Brit is on next year’s regulation which he thinks is like the 2022 one.
It feels nothing from the outside, but the nuances is making it a fun process of designing. He has passed on some information to improve the current 2025 car, but it is mostly lunch break conversations. He is busy taking feedback from Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll, to improve the 2026 machine.
The new-age facility is top notch as he credits the work down by Lawrence Stroll. He also has faith on Honda to deliver and Andy Cowell to lead them well as well. He expanded on why he hasn’t traveled to races so far, while adding that he should be in Monaco with his red notebook.
Joining new team, philosophy, mentality –
Newey: “When you join a new team, it’s always difficult to know what the experience is going to be. Every time I’ve joined a new team, each has been very different. The first thing I can say about the team is that everyone has been very welcoming, which is great – it hasn’t always been the case when I’ve started with a new team. This is a team that has grown a lot in headcount over a very short space of time. We have great facilities, people are keen and enthusiastic, and it is our job to get on and get everything working smoothly. F1 is about people: yes, there is a lot of technology, but it’s people who drive things forward. Winning mentality is always a difficult one. If it’s a team that hasn’t had much success over the years, then not winning becomes the norm. It’s important to create the self-belief that we have the collective abilities to succeed.
“This is all part of trying to drive things forward. Now, I’m not a cheerleader, and I’m not like an American football coach who will stand up at the front of a room and give a rousing speech. It’s about working with everybody and developing together. I suppose I work in two ways really: one way is thinking about the problem of what we need to do to make the cars go quicker; looking at the regulations, talking to the drivers, trying to get the information in, and then proposing some solutions via the drawing board. The other way – what we’re talking about here – is working with the people in the engineering departments, looking at their work, discussing their ideas, trying to move us forward.”
Facility, Lawrence Stroll’s work, Andy Cowell partnership –
Newey: “Lawrence’s vision has created a great facility – the best facility in F1 – but it is important that we now optimise how we use it. Again, this is a people sport. My previous team had one of the worst wind tunnels in F1 and operates out of an unremarkable series of buildings on an industrial estate, but it managed to get everybody working together and developed a great group of people. We have many talented people – also a few areas that need strengthening with greater numbers – and we need to get everyone working together better, using these tools and developing our abilities.
“I’ve known Andy for a very long time, going back to my McLaren days, when he was at Mercedes High Performance Engines. I’ve got a huge amount of respect for him, and his track record speaks for itself. I think our roles here are somewhat different. Andy’s very much looking at the whole company and how everything fits together. I’m concentrating more on the engineering side, but having said that, there’s a lot of overlap: I feed ideas into him and he feeds ideas into me, so there’s very good synergy.”
2026 regs –
Newey: “My thoughts on the ’26 regulations are similar to what my thoughts were about the big regulation change for 2022: initially thinking the regulations were so prescriptive that there wasn’t much left here [for a designer], but then you start to drill into the detail and realise there’s more flexibility for innovation and different approaches than first meets the eye. We saw that at the start of 2022, with teams taking really quite different directions. Now, of course, four seasons on, they’ve largely converged, but initially that wasn’t the case. Variation between teams is great. It’s all a bit boring if the cars look identical and the only way you can tell them apart is the livery. I think there’s a high probability that in ’26 we’ll see something similar to ’22. There’s enough flexibility in the regulations, and I’m sure people will come up with different solutions.
“Some of those will be dropped over the first two or three years as teams start to converge. The other aspect of this is that, for the first time I can remember, we’ve got both the chassis regulations and power unit regulations changing at the same time. This is… interesting… and slightly scary. Both the new aerodynamic rules and the PU regulations present opportunities. I would expect to see a range of aero solutions and there could be variation in PU performance across the grid to begin with – which is what happened when the hybrid regulations first came in, in 2014. Next year marks the start of our works partnership with Honda. I’ve got a lot of trust in Honda and a huge amount of respect for them, having worked with them before. They took a year out of F1 and so, to some extent, they’re playing catch-up, but they’re a great group of engineers and very much an engineering-led company.”
Working on the car –
Newey: “We’re pursuing various avenues. Whether those are different avenues to others and whether they will be a better avenue than others, we’ve got no idea. That’s part of the intrigue of F1, especially when you get these big rule changes. It’s always difficult, when you have a big regulation change like this, and all teams are resource-limited, because of the budget cap and simply because of staffing levels. The team shapes the approach, to a certain extent. One area of our team that needs to grow is the aerodynamics department.
“But in the short term that means we’ve got to decide which directions are going to be the most fruitful and really concentrate our resources on those. Of course, in doing that, there’s always a danger that we’ve missed an avenue. Quite often, you have to go a long way down a certain branch before you know whether it’s going to be a fruitful one or not. It’s sometimes the case that a branch might not start off looking that promising, because it’s very new and underdeveloped, but actually it’s got more fruit at the end.”
Work on AMR25 –
Newey: “Lawrence understandably wants us to do as well as we can in 2025 so there’s a small team still working on this year’s car from an aerodynamics point of view. I’ve had a few lunchtime conversations with that small group, discussing the car and what we can do about it.”
Driver feedback –
Newey: “I’ve also spoken extensively with both Lance and Fernando, getting their input on the strengths and weaknesses of the current car, the correlation between the current car and the driver-in-the-loop simulator, and so on. The drivers are an essential part of the feedback loop of how you modify the engineering organisation and the way you go about things. It’s a process that has changed hugely over the years. For me, the big change between when I first started and where we are now is the advent of data recorders.
“It’s easier now to take what the driver is saying and look at how that is showing up in the data. At the same time, drivers are intuitive beasts. They will modify their driving style to cover handling deficits in the car, and report on how the car responds to that modified style, perhaps without realising that they’ve changed what they’re doing. So, you can’t wholly rely on data, you have to get inside their heads too.”
Replicate championship glory with Aston Martin –
Newey: “There’s no point in daydreaming about the future. It’s about getting on and doing the work. If we do our work correctly, hopefully things will come together. A modern F1 car is a very complicated beast. It’s physically complex, just because of the sheer number of parts – but that complexity is multiplied by the amount of simulation that goes into producing it. F1 teams are increasingly dependent on simulation tools: computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the wind tunnel itself and the correlation between the real car on track and those tools. It’s an area that demands a lot of development.
“You can buy a CFD package off the shelf, but you need to tweak it, learn to use it, likewise a wind tunnel, where you can buy hardware but have to write software to drive the motion system. It’s the same with a driver-in-the-loop simulator: you can have the best motion system in the world, but if you don’t have the modelling to go with it, and correlation with the aero model, correlation with the tyre model and so on, it won’t be of any use. It all takes time.”
Notebook, circuit return –
Newey: “To be honest, the notebook doesn’t have much in it, 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! 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.”
Here’s Fernando Alonso on 2025 and Adrian Newey
