There has been some misunderstanding among the F1 fan community about Adrian Newey’s position at the Aston Martin F1 team. Several unofficial websites have stated that he is ‘stepping down’ from his role as team principal and have incorrectly surmised it as a demotion because of the team’s disastrous start to the season.
That’s nonsense, as team owner Lawrence Stroll made clear in his statement last week. Changes are afoot, and are almost certainly linked to the immediate departure from Audi of its team principal (TP) Jonathan Wheatley last week, but this is absolutely nothing to do with Aston’s horribly PU-compromised competitive performance.
The expected changes are merely the continued fallout from Andy Cowell’s shock surrendering in February of the TP role he had only assumed a year before. This came in the wake of Newey making a sweeping hiring and firing of key technical staff in November.
Cowell’s surrendering of the TP role was very much unplanned and, our sources indicate, fully Cowell’s initiative, one which came as a shock to the management team.
Cowell, undermined in his role by Newey’s actions, effectively threw up his hands and announced ‘I’m out’. There was clearly a clash around the overlap of assumed responsibilities between two very heavyweight technical people.
Cowell’s future at Aston remains in doubt
Aston Martin
Although Cowell is now officially the team’s chief strategy officer and, in the words of Newey, has, “very magnanimously volunteered to focus on the technical partnership between the team, Honda and Aramco,” his long-term future with the team remains in doubt.
Newey had no desire to be team principal, a role which carries many time and energy-consuming non-technical responsibilities which are of little interest to him. He was simply left holding the baby following Cowell’s decision and from that moment the search has been on for a new team principal, with Newey effectively a caretaker in that role for the time being.
This is all about the very specific requirements Newey feels he needs to create to the best of his ability. History has shown that as a creative genius he resents being controlled. He left Williams at the end of 1996 because Patrick Head and Frank Williams treated him as an employee rather than a partner. He was at McLaren between 1998 and 2005 but was deeply hacked off at how Ron Dennis and Martin Whitmarsh sought to control what they saw as his excesses.
In his book, Newey comments that Whitmarsh’s way of doing that was to introduce, “a matrix structure to the engineering departments, an unnecessarily complex and unworkable system of department heads and ‘performance creators’ informally known as ‘mullahs’.”
The mullahs would informally report to Dennis and Whitmarsh about whatever Newey was doing, essentially a spy network. When Newey was undermined further by a show-of-hands vote on whether or not to initiate a programme he wanted and he lost, he was essentially lost to McLaren and looking for an out – one which Christian Horner provided by giving him everything he wanted at Red Bull, allowing him to structure things however he wanted and Horner would look after everything else, including finding the money to fund Newey’s projects.