When will Aston Martin be able to fully harness its F1 star power?

It’s not easy being green – especially in Formula 1. While British teams, draped in the deepest of verdant hues, arguably ruled the roost in the early 1960s, the glory days of British Racing Green were phased out for a clutch of multi-toned cigarette packets on wheels as the 1970s approached.

Revivals seldom paid off. Lotus’s attempt to reinstate the green in its sunset years was impinged upon by myriad smaller sponsor logos. Jaguar’s rebrand of Stewart lasted five disappointing years with its cars bobbing around in the midfield, and Tony Fernandes’s Lotus/Caterham squad showed initial promise but could not truly clamber off the back of the grid. 

On the face of it, Aston Martin could be viewed as heading the same way. Since the team’s chairman Lawrence Stroll decided to buy into the luxury car brand, and then used its image to lend his own Racing Point team the James Bond-adjacent veneer of a classy, serious racing team, fortunes have been mixed.

The team was hurt by the last-minute floor regulation changes in 2021, when its Mercedes-inspired car tended not to excel as much as it had the year prior, and a deliberately conservative 2022 effort was moulded into a more competitive car by the arrival of Dan Fallows.

A high-profile recruit from Red Bull, Fallows led the technical charge into 2023, a season that began tremendously well with Fernando Alonso collecting a series of podium finishes and consistently the biggest challenger to the Red Bull drivers at the start of the year.

Then the sheen started to fade. Development of the AMR23 did not appear to catch on through the year, leading to a downturn in results. This continued into 2024; the season started reasonably well, but attempts to improve the car backfired.

Heady days of 2023 – Aston Martin’s last podium was at the Brazilian Grand Prix

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

While augmentations to the peak performance may well have existed, they appeared to be unreachable as the handling characteristics declined over the course of the year.

Of course, Stroll’s vision for the team could not sanction such a decline; Fallows was moved aside, team principal Mike Krack was given a new role, and recently added CEO Andy Cowell – formerly the chief of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains – was installed in the Luxembourger’s stead. Krack effectively took over performance director Tom McCullough’s role as the dominoes continued to fall.

This all succeeded the bombshell announcement that the team had secured the services of revered design guru Adrian Newey, lured by the offer of shares, the team’s new facilities overlooking the Silverstone circuit, and a chance to hunker down uninterrupted on the 2026 car.

Accruing the top-level dyad of Cowell and Newey gives Aston Martin a huge level of credibility as it embarks upon its 2026 project. Newey’s lengthy list of successes is well-known, with titles at Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, but it’s equally important to hand Cowell his flowers too.

While Newey’s attention is on the next series of regulations, Cowell has to carry the can for the here-and-now

After starting out with Cosworth, with a brief stint at BMW before rejoining the British marque, Cowell spent around 15 years working on Mercedes’ various F1 engine projects. Installed as managing director in early 2013, the Briton was credited as a key force behind the German manufacturer’s whirlwind success at the start of the turbo-hybrid era.

Although the all-new facilities at Aston Martin are impressive, Cowell and Newey have both – as is their wont – identified areas for improvement. But, while Newey’s attention is on the next series of regulations, Cowell has to carry the can for the here-and-now.

The thorny subject of 2025 cannot be avoided here, since the year has not started with anything approaching the same vigour as did 2023 or 2024 – and the bespectacled team principal admitted that “the journey [at the start of the year] hasn’t been enjoyable”, with points coming at a premium.

Lance Stroll’s sixth-place finish in Australia is the team’s best result of the season so far

Photo by: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Why 2025 is a test bed for 2026

When it was put to Alonso earlier this year that 2025 was almost a holding pattern for the team, he largely agreed with that sentiment. But the idea of driving a 2026 car, and one influenced by Newey no less, is still tickling his competitive itch.

The Spanish veteran would have no qualms about riding into the sunset to collect his pension were that not to be the case.

Alonso has therefore been largely content with the idea that 2025 is simply laying the groundwork for what could be a last hurrah – a last attempt at securing win #33 and title #3. Either way, Aston Martin has at least pressed updates into service, and these appear to have helped the team find a little bit more in the way of performance.

In his explanation of the opening updates brought to the track at the start of the ‘European season’ in May, Cowell stated that these had been in development since December, but that the team had chosen to push back their introduction to give the aerodynamicists time to calibrate them in the new wind tunnel.

The intention was not to necessarily create that delay, Cowell explained, but to ensure that the team was sure that any new parts offered something on their delivery to the circuit – in this case, Imola.

In any case, starting a part in one wind tunnel and finishing it in another helps to close out the commissioning work approaching completion in Aston Martin’s new facilities.

Reshuffle at the start of 2025 shifted Cowell into the team principal role

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

“We’ve got some really talented people – how do we get all of us to work well together so that we have ideas and we swiftly introduce full-size parts to the track and we’ve got confidence that they work?” Cowell said of the Aston Martin engineers.

“It’s creating a racing team that can do that, having innovative ideas and quickly getting them to the race track so our time to the circuit is as tight as possible, but we’re not rushing and therefore missing the target.

“That for me is the number one priority because that’s what’s important for our future. However, the journey over the last six races hasn’t been enjoyable. Coming racing and not getting points is not enjoyable, so there’s a desire to make the AMR25 a more competitive car, but there’s probably a greater desire to make sure that our innovation machine is more robust and then we can squeeze the timeframe.”

Had the team mothballed its work on 2025 and simply used the wind tunnel for 2026 development work, then the link between simulations and track data would simply not exist

While it might seem folly for Aston Martin to put resources into an underperforming 2025 car, there is still value in doing so, as expressed by the use of the new wind tunnel. Spending the money on parts and testing them ensures that, when they reach the track, the team has a clear vision of how the data produced in wind tunnel testing correlates to the real thing on track.

Had the team mothballed its work on 2025 and simply used the wind tunnel for 2026 development work, then the link between simulations and track data would simply not exist.

Allied to that are Newey’s own suggestions for improvement related to the current driver-in-loop simulator currently used by Aston Martin. In his conversations with Alonso and Lance Stroll, Newey found that the driver-operated simulator was lacking in its correlation to the real car; you can infer that the representation of updates did not necessarily replicate the changes in handling characteristics, versus the real-world representation.

2025 has been heavy going so far – here Alonso takes to the Barcelona gravel

Photo by: Kym Illman / Getty Images

“[Simulation] is an area that demands a lot of development,” Newey said in his first sit-down with media since joining Aston Martin.

“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.”

Preparing for 2026 with Newey and Honda

“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,” Newey says of the 2026 rules, which he now feels are not as prescriptive as he’d feared on their unveiling last year.

“Both the new aerodynamic rules and the PU [power unit] 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.

Newey says the scope of changes in the 2026 regulations is “slightly scary”

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

“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.”

Having Newey (who has worked with Honda since 2019) and Cowell (an engine man himself) working directly with the Japanese manufacturer should yield dividends, as it transfers its works attention to Aston Martin.

The extent to which Honda has had to rebuild its F1 engine project is unknown, given its complex departure then partial re-entry with Red Bull, but the company should not suffer the same ills as its fraught return to F1 in 2015 with McLaren.

While many assume that 2026 will be powertrain-sensitive, much like 2014, the simultaneous change in aero regulations will at least give Aston Martin hope that Newey can help deliver the goods

And, although us paddock scribes occasionally hear musings about Mercedes’ 2026 powertrain being strong, and the Audi and Red Bull Ford units having undergone less felicitous development periods, Honda feels like a genuine unknown.

While many assume that 2026 will be powertrain-sensitive, much like 2014, the simultaneous change in aero regulations will at least give Aston Martin hope that Newey can help deliver the goods. Regardless, as Cowell puts it, managing the new regulations is not simply about 2026 – the team’s attention also has to go beyond. 

Take Williams, for example, managed by Cowell’s former Mercedes colleague James Vowles. Much has been made of the Grove squad’s approach to improving the underfunded facilities, but Vowles has also been keen to stress the value of tightening up the processes used in designing, testing and cataloguing the car build to remove the resources lost to any bloat or logjams in the system.

Cowell on the mic as Stroll and Alonso survey the AMR25 at the F1 75 Live launch event

Photo by: Clive Mason/Getty Images

As such, Williams has started 2025 where Aston Martin had hoped to be: bridging the gap between the top four teams and the midfield.

“We’re not here for just this season, we’re here to do well over many seasons,” says Cowell. “The 2026 regulations, that change and the aero resource restrictions that we’ve got with CFD and wind tunnel time mean that we need to make some really awkward decisions. 

“The thing that we’re all absolutely united on though is that transforming our business into an efficient development machine is priority number one. That’s important for both 2025 if we choose to spend resource in 2025, and ’26, ’27, ’28, ’29, ’30 and onwards.

“So that’s what we have to focus on and [from 2025 updates] we’ll learn a lot – as we will at other points through this year and next year as well.

“I don’t think when you’ve introduced a new part whether it’s in a race car, in a power unit, in a mobile phone – whatever it is, when an engineering team release that part and it’s being used in anger, I don’t think you ever assume that either the product is perfect, or the method you used is perfect, or the people are perfect, or the tool set used is perfect. There’s always areas to improve.”

It was suggested last year, by a handful of those who work in F1, that teams would ‘give up’ on 2025 and focus entirely on 2026. While it’s true that Aston Martin has partially sacrificed this season for the next, perhaps prompted by its ineffectual start to the year, a small uptick in performance is showing some of the value of ‘using’ 2025 as a training ground exercise.

But the pressure, given its top-line recruitment over recent months, will be loaded on for next season. Cowell and Newey must steer the ship through it.

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Alonso’s season started with Australia shunt and has barely looked up

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