{"id":454146,"date":"2026-02-04T21:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T21:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/454146\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T21:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T21:53:09","slug":"the-amr26-you-saw-isnt-the-one-thatll-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/454146\/","title":{"rendered":"The AMR26 You Saw Isn\u2019t the One That\u2019ll Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aston Martin boss and design legend Adrian Newey has teased that his AMR26 will already be \u201cvery different\u201d by the time Formula 1 arrives at the opening round.<\/p>\n

The AMR26, the first Aston Martin designed by Newey after his arrival at the team in March 2025, broke cover on the penultimate day of last week\u2019s Barcelona shakedown.<\/p>\n

The car has already captured the attention, and piqued the interest of rivals, owing to some unusual design approaches, most notably the geometry of the suspension. <\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n

But Newey has already hinted that changes will be in the offing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe AMR26 that races in Melbourne is going to be very different to the one people saw at the Barcelona Shakedown,\u201d Newey said in an in-house Aston Martin interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe AMR26 that we finish the season with in Abu Dhabi is going to be very different to the one that we start the season with.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very important to keep an open mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid suggestions that the AMR26 is an aggressive concept, Newey countered: \u201cI never look at any of my designs as aggressive. I just get on with things and pursue what we feel is the right direction. <\/p>\n

\"formula<\/p>\n

F1<\/p>\n

\u201cThe direction we\u2019ve taken could certainly be interpreted as aggressive. It\u2019s got quite a few features that haven\u2019t necessarily been done before. Does that make it aggressive? Possibly. Possibly not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Newey, who was appointed as Aston Martin\u2019s Team Principal for 2026 alongside his role as Managing Technical Partner, said of the AMR26: \u201cWe\u2019ve attempted to build something that we hope will have quite a lot of development potential. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you want to try to avoid is a car that comes out quite optimized within its window but lacks a lot of development potential. We\u2019ve tried to do the opposite, which is why we\u2019ve really focused on the fundamentals, put our effort into those, knowing that some of the appendages\u2014wings, bodywork, things that can be changed in season\u2014will hopefully have development potential.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related Stories<\/p>\n

However, despite the presence of Newey, Aston Martin\u2019s exclusive new power unit partnership with Honda, and the swathes of investment into its evolving Silverstone campus from owner Lawrence Stroll, the team is wary that it is entering 2026 slightly on the backfoot. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe wind tunnel on song until April, and I only joined the team last March, so we\u2019ve started from behind, in truth,\u201d Newey said. \u201cIt\u2019s been a very compressed timescale and an extremely busy 10 months.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that we didn\u2019t get a model of the \u201926 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April, whereas most, if not all of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle. The car only came together at the last minute, which is why we were fighting to make it to the Barcelona Shakedown.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lettermark\"<\/p>\n

U.K.-based Phillip Horton started covering Grands Prix while still at university and swiftly deemed that writing about Formula 1 and the behind-the-scenes machinations was much more engaging than reading centuries-old novels. Degree gained, he went on to cover the sport full-time from 2014 and is as intrigued and excited by the destinations Formula 1 visits during its lengthy annual world tour as the racing itself. Phillip joined Autoweek in 2021 and while he has just about learned to spell in American English he has yet to find anywhere in America that makes a proper cup of tea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aston Martin boss and design legend Adrian Newey has teased that his AMR26 will already be \u201cvery different\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,782,186562,784,578,576,577,1642,186561,82,184740],"class_list":{"0":"post-454146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-formula-1","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-content-type-news","11":"tag-contentid-6e6afd08-583e-41c8-b6d8-bf4292fdd5f3","12":"tag-displaytype-standard-article","13":"tag-f1","14":"tag-formula-1","15":"tag-formula1","16":"tag-locale-us","17":"tag-shorttitle-the-amr26-you-saw-isnt-the-one-thatll-race","18":"tag-sports","19":"tag-subsection-formula-one"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}