{"id":563436,"date":"2026-03-25T13:50:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/563436\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T13:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T13:50:09","slug":"mph-newey-isnt-being-demoted-heres-whats-actually-happening-at-aston-martin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/563436\/","title":{"rendered":"MPH: Newey isn’t being demoted. Here’s what’s actually happening at Aston Martin"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been some misunderstanding among the F1 fan community about Adrian Newey\u2019s position at the Aston Martin<\/a> F1 team. Several unofficial websites have stated that he is \u2018stepping down\u2019 from his role as team principal and have incorrectly surmised it as a demotion because of the team\u2019s disastrous start to the season.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s horribly PU-compromised competitive performance.<\/p>\n

The expected changes are merely the continued fallout from Andy Cowell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Cowell\u2019s surrendering of the TP role was very much unplanned and, our sources indicate, fully Cowell\u2019s initiative, one which came as a shock to the management team.<\/p>\n

Cowell, undermined in his role by Newey\u2019s actions, effectively threw up his hands and announced \u2018I\u2019m out\u2019. There was clearly a clash around the overlap of assumed responsibilities between two very heavyweight technical people.<\/p>\n

\"Andy<\/p>\n

Cowell\u2019s future at Aston remains in doubt<\/p>\n

\n Aston Martin\n <\/p>\n

Although Cowell is now officially the team\u2019s chief strategy officer and, in the words of Newey, has, \u201cvery magnanimously volunteered to focus on the technical partnership between the team, Honda and Aramco,\u201d his long-term future with the team remains in doubt.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> at the end of 1996 because Patrick Head and Frank Williams treated him as an employee rather than a partner. He was at McLaren<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

In his book, Newey comments that Whitmarsh\u2019s way of doing that was to introduce, \u201ca matrix structure to the engineering departments, an unnecessarily complex and unworkable system of department heads and \u2018performance creators\u2019 informally known as \u2018mullahs\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 one which Christian Horner provided by giving him everything he wanted at Red Bull<\/a>, allowing him to structure things however he wanted and Horner would look after everything else, including finding the money to fund Newey\u2019s projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There has been some misunderstanding among the F1 fan community about Adrian Newey\u2019s position at the Aston Martin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[2074,2495,64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-563436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-adrian-newey","tag-aston-martin","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}