Aston Martin boss Andy Cowell has confirmed recent reports that “100%” of Adrian Newey’s time has been spent looking at the 2026 F1 car instead of this season’s machine.
The former Red Bull chief technical officer started at the team as managing technical partner in March, and did not have any input on the design of the AMR25 car, which has had a slow start to the season.
Lance Stroll did bag points in both Australia and China, but the car is off the pace with Fernando Alonso currently point-less four races into the campaign, heading into the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend.
Given Newey’s expertise in designing championship-winning cars, the possibility of him looking at the AMR25 for potential areas to improve has been raised, but Cowell has rejected the idea, insisting that Newey’s full focus is on the massive overhaul coming for 2026.
“100% of Adrian’s designing time is on 2026,” Cowell told media, including RacingNews365, in Jeddah.
“He joined in March, so there was a period of him getting up to speed with the regulations and up to speed with the concept work we were doing in the preceding couple of months.
“There are some tough deadlines to meet for releasing monocoque details, transmission details, and the cars are running earlier for the 2026 season, with the test at the end of January.
“Getting a car ready for that point requires slightly earlier decision points, and clearly everything is new, and there is zero carry-over [from 2025].
“There is a lot of work there, and Adrian has just been focused on that, but there is value in Adrian understanding the tools we’ve got, the fidelity of those tools and the precision with which they predict what is going to happen on the race-track rather than any direct performance aspect for the 2025 car.
“He has been hugely complimentary about the campus and has been positive about the tunnel we got and the way that everything has been set-up.
“He is of course, pushing for us to improve the way we operate in the tunnel, the way we operate with CFD and lap simulations.”
