Interview
EXCLUSIVE: Newey on improving Aston Martin’s ‘weak’ tools, being a ‘maverick’ and focusing on 2026
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It's Thursday afternoon in Monaco and the sun is soaking the iconic Principality. Adrian Newey is sat on the roof of Aston Martin's plush motorhome sipping soft drink with a slice of lemon ahead of our interview.
This is the first time Newey has made an appearance at a race track since he started work at Aston Martin on March 3. In fact, aside from just one weekend off earlier this month, this is the first time he hasn't spent almost all of his days in the office, stood at his drawing board.
"My wife observes that I do, and I'm kind of aware that I do, go into a bit of a design trance where I'm not really very aware of what's going on around me," Newey tells me of the way he's immersed himself in his new project.
"It's just all of my limited processing powers going into thinking about how to design the car and how to get through all the deadlines.
Adrian Newey chats with F1 Correspondent & Presenter Lawrence Barretto
"It's funny – I remember when I started at McLaren, we also had a big regulation change the following year. I started August 1, and we had a car out the following February.
"Cars now are so complicated and the research tools are so sophisticated that starting early March, I'm struggling to keep up with the deadlines for also to get a car running in February."
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'It's fair to say that some of our tools are weak'
Newey knows he's up against it. Aston Martin are a team that sit seventh in the Teams' Championship, their progress stunting since 2023 when they started the season with six podiums in eight races.
That is a world away from where billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll, who made Newey his Managing Partner, wanted to be when he saved the team – then known as Racing Point – from closure and made them Aston Martin.
That might explain in part why Newey, 65, is committing as many hours as he can to help take the team towards the front. Time is not on his side – so that's why his full focus is on 2026, when there are sweeping changes to both the chassis and power unit regulations. So, how is it going sticking to the tight deadlines?
"I'm trying to, because experience does say, whilst it's tempting to kind of push the system and let everything slip a bit, if you let it slip too much, then things can suffer a bit in the detail."
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Having spent nearly three months at Aston Martin's Silverstone base, the design genius has started to get a good picture of what works and what doesn't. The facility is state-of-the-art – and the class leader in the sport, but there are areas that need work.
"It's fair to say that some of our tools are weak," he says. "Particularly the driver-in-the-loop simulator needs a lot of work because it's not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool."
The roots of the Aston Martin team trace back to the little independent operation called Jordan, founded by Eddie Jordan. They've always operated efficiently with a small budget. It's one thing to do that, though, and another to be able to make the most of significantly more resources.
As a result, they are suffering growing pains – and thus Newey accepts it would be unwise to stress the system too quickly and it will take time to gel the project.
"I think Aston has gone from a small team as Jordan, and then the pink team at Force India, and then into Racing Point and so forth, where it's always a small but over-performing team," he says.
"It's grown hugely in a very short space of time into what it is now. And we now really need to settle down and kind of get the organisational structure perhaps a little bit better sorted out, work out how we all work together as effectively as possible and develop the simulation tools, because that's one of the areas which I would say we're quite weak in."
Adrian Newey with Aston Martin CEO & Team Principal Andy Cowell
I suggest that is not the work of a moment.
"Unfortunately not, no," he says. "But it's a very enjoyable challenge. I think I'm very lucky to be starting with Andy Cowell, who I've known for very many years, so we can divide up our responsibilities and both get on with our respective jobs."
He adds: "To sort out a plan to get it where it needs to be, that's probably a two-year project in truth."
'I've been a bit of a maverick within the team'
You get the sense Newey is unperturbed by this, though. If anything, it feels like he's relishing such a big challenge – particularly because his boss has given him the absolute freedom to work in the way he needs to so he can get the job done.
"I've always, way back to my Leyton House days, tried to make sure that the way I can operate the team, within the team, gives me a lot of freedom, so I try to have very few direct reports," he says.
"And I suppose you could say I've been a bit of a maverick within the team in terms of trying to chase what I think is most appropriate by working with my fellow colleagues, guys and girls, engineers, and then also standing at my drawing board and kind of trying to think about the big picture."
Newey is on the ground in Monaco with Aston Martin
Stroll will have been enticed by Newey's 'maverick' tendencies – displayed when he won World Championships with McLaren, Williams and Red Bull – and while such an approach has been successful, it does bring unpredictability.
"The big thing you always have when you have a big regulation change like that is all teams are resource limited," he says. "And I think because of our newness, if you like, we are perhaps particularly resource limited in a few areas.
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"So what does that mean? It means that you can't explore lots of different avenues. I always like to use the analogy of a mountain. Maybe you've got three mountaintops out there and you decide to start climbing one mountaintop.
"You don't know whether ultimately that route is going to have a higher peak than a mountain over there, but you've got to go through the valley before you can explore one of the others.
"And because of our limited resource, we've got to really choose one avenue, pursue that in hopes it's a reasonably fruitful one."
Much of Newey's time is focused on the 2026 Aston Martin car
'I've been really concentrating on the 2026 car'
Aston Martin have scored just twice in Grands Prix this year, with Fernando Alonso still awaiting his first top-10 (he's been close with three 11th-place finishes). While Newey could have been tempted to dive in and try and save this season – he's so far limited his focus to 2026 with just a few "lunchtime chats" on this year's machine.
"I'm quite disciplined like that I suppose," he says. "I tend to be, as I said earlier, a bit tunnel vision. So I've been really concentrating on the 2026 car. But yes, doing lunchtime chats, there's a small core team that's working on the 2025 car and will do for a few months yet.
"We'll have an upgrade somewhere around Silverstone time. So I've just been having lunchtime chats with that core team of kind of what you're up to, discussing ideas, putting a few ideas in and we'll see where we get to."
READ MORE: Stroll hit with grid penalty after Leclerc clash in opening Monaco GP practice
Having spent the last three months assessing what Aston have and how they work at base, Newey has broken cover and is at a race track for the first time this year. He'll be plugged in to all debriefs, but mainly observer, while ensuring he spends time with the drivers to build a relationship as well as the trackside team as a whole.
And expect to see him roaming the grid on Sunday with his notebook and clipboard, taking a look at what everyone else is doing and build his already bulging memory bank.
"It's the first time I've seen these cars at all," he says. "And I haven't actually spent very long studying photographs of them either. So, for me, it will be interesting to see what everybody's been up to over the winter in the first few races and see how the teams have changed their cars relative to last year."
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