Aston Martin has seen significant evolution over this season, with CEO and team boss Andy Cowell revealing how the Silverstone-based squad is honing its potential.
The former Jordan and Force India team has built itself up with a full infrastructure overhaul at its Silverstone factory in recent years, with the Lawrence Stroll-owned team investing heavily in top-level personnel and facilities.
Andy Cowell: Everything is ‘better’ compared to 10 months ago
One of those top-level people is Andy Cowell, with the former Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains managing director being convinced enough by Aston Martin’s potential that he ended a near five-year sabbatical from F1 to return to the coalface.
Last July, Cowell was announced as Aston Martin’s Group CEO, succeeding Martin Whitmarsh, and, having started work in late 2024, appointed himself as team principal as the team went through an organisational restructuring to keep former team boss Mike Krack focused on trackside activities.
As well as Cowell, former Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey picked up his new post as Aston Martin’s managing technical partner in March 2025, with his first months at work seeing him concentrate on the development of the F1 2026 challenger for the sport’s revolutionary new ruleset.
Newey, as well as new chief technical officer Enrico Cardile, are working at a factory that has been significantly overhauled with cutting-edge technology and facilities, including a brand-new driver simulator and the newest wind tunnel amongst all the Formula 1 teams.
Alongside refreshes of every step of the design, production, and testing processes, this is a team that, despite its longevity, is almost in a state of infancy, with new people learning how best to utilise all the new toys.
But the process of learning has seen the team make significant steps through the F1 2025 season, believes Cowell, who offered a clear picture of where things have changed most since he took over at the helm in late 2024.
“Everything’s better,” he said, when asked where he feels Aston Martin is at when it comes to being able to fully exploit the potential of the factory and its infrastructure.
“Is it optimised? No, an optimised solution is only of value on that day; things can always get better.
“Perfection is also something that you aspire to but never, never reach. But everything’s better.
“So the approach in CFD, the approach in lap simulation, the approach to driver-in-the-loop simulator, the wind tunnel accuracy that we’ve got, the data processing to bring all of that together to try and understand what next to work on is more thorough, the approach that Chris Cronin [chief engineer] and Mike Krack take at the circuit to do robust experiments to give the best possible answer, and working with the aero performance group to come up with good load measurements on the car.
“All of that is is more thorough, more precise, and the responsibilities within the organisation are clearer as to who’s doing each step of that journey, who’s got the responsibility for each step of that journey, so that everybody’s roles are a little bit narrower, more focused, which then allows you to go deeper in your understanding, and greater expertise in each of the fields.”
In an era in which on-track testing is negligible, a team can draw plenty of strength from the accuracy of its data correlation, ie. how components and, therefore, the car, react on-track in real life relative to what a team’s simulations say should happen.
It’s an area that has seen World Champion teams like Mercedes and Red Bull go astray in this ground-effect regulation cycle, and Cowell is confident that the raft of new infrastructure is being optimised to correctly match the reality when the AMR26 hits the track for the first time.
“Have we had a great first half of this season? No, we haven’t,” he said.
“We’re at the back end of the Constructors’ table, and we’ve had DNFs, so we’ve got work to do to make sure that our engineering machine is more thorough with reliability, more thorough with data understanding, and delivers a greater rate of performance to the circuit. That’s just a daily task, and will be a daily task forever.
“Compared with 10 months ago, I think things are better, most of which was the infrastructure that was already being worked on before I joined.
“But, hopefully, I’ve helped drive a focus on what does everybody do? What’s your contribution along this journey? Engineering is such a complex machine, it’s about breaking it down into each section, and then a relay race.
“So everybody needs to know what each step of the race is, and everybody needs to understand the style of data that they’re going to receive and work with it, pass it on, and present in a format that people understand.
“That’s the work we’ve been trying to do, and it’s just to consolidate. We’re in a process of, ‘How do we consolidate that? How do we continuously question what we’re doing, and how do we do it quicker without cutting corners?’
“We’re all guilty, as human beings, of saying, ‘I want to do that quicker’, and we instantly think, ‘Which bit can I miss out?’
“But that tends to bite you. So, how do we do it quicker without cutting corners?
“Is that different tool sets? Is that improved teamwork? What is it? It’s creativity to do what you’d love to do quicker. There’s innovation in that aspect of work, as well as coming up with a new widget that gives you 10 points of downforce.”
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Andy Cowell assesses the impact of his own arrival at Aston Martin
Given how engrained Cowell is at Aston Martin, it’s easy to forget that he is not that long established in his role, having spent four and a half years outside of F1.
Leaving the Mercedes engine programme he had been a part of for two decades, Cowell appears to have adjusted back to the gruelling demands of a Formula 1 lifestyle with relative ease, even though he’s now working in a role that gives him even greater responsibilities than he ever had.
Asked to assess how he’d view his own contribution to the evolution of Aston Martin in recent months, Cowell said, “I guess what we’ve tried to do is make sure that our targets are clear, our assessments are clear, the responsibilities are clear, both for the team in the factory and the team at the circuit, and we work following those responsibilities.
“Also, we work to develop packages that we bring to the track. We take robust measurements, as best you can, of a racing car on a race track and understand and look at the data and follow the data, and, if the data doesn’t give us a clear answer, well, what do we need to do?
“Do we need to put more sensors on the car? Do we need to change the filtering on the sensors? Do we need to process the data differently?
“How do we react, so trying to focus on a robust engineering discipline and be data-led. It’s the journey that we’re all trying to go on.
“We’re a Formula 1 racing team, but it’s a group of engineers trying to understand and engineer a race car, to understand how to make it quicker, and, equally, if there are reliability issues, how to solve those reliability issues.”
While his previous role at Mercedes saw him take charge of a more specific engineering department, his new job has seen him step forward in autonomy – it’s a position in which he can more greatly influence the direction of travel for Stroll’s team, an outfit that appears to be knocking on the door of starting to realise the potential it’s built up in recent years.
Is he enjoying that new autonomy? How does the challenge of leading an F1 team, now that he’s doing it, differ from what his expectations were prior to starting?
“It’s new, but similar. I’ve worked in motorsport, in leading engineering teams for a while; that aspect is very similar,” he said.
“At the end of the day, it’s about chasing performance and making sure it’s reliable, and the engineering mindsets are very similar, even if the product is slightly different.
“The interface with drivers is a lot more one-on-one, rather than through a team principal or a chief engineer. But everybody wants the same. Everybody wants the performance development rate to be strong.
“Everybody wants to create the fastest race car; before, it used to be the most powerful power unit, now it’s just the fastest race car.
“So, yeah, I’ve been enjoying it. Every day is learning. Every day is coming up with a slightly adjusted plan. But yeah, I’m enjoying the challenge.
“Aston Martin is a dream team to work for, to be honest, and everybody that I’m getting to know is so enthusiastic about the mission that we’ve got and the journey that we’re taking, so it’s exciting to be part of the team and hopefully helping us go in the right direction.”
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