Adrian Newey\u2019s arrival at Aston Martin has seen the team\u2019s wind tunnel personnel \u2018respond tremendously\u2019 as excitement kicks in ahead of F1 2026.<\/p>\n
Aston Martin secured the services of the most successful technical brain in Formula 1, with Adrian Newey working full steam ahead on the revolutionary 2026 ruleset for his new team.<\/p>\n
Andy Cowell: Aston Martin trying \u2018different architectural ideas\u2019 in the wind tunnel<\/p>\n
Newey left his previous role as Red Bull\u2019s chief technical officer in May 2024, before taking up his new position as managing technical partner at Aston Martin earlier this year.<\/p>\n
While the AMR25 hasn\u2019t been hugely competitive this year, the short-term nature of improvements to the 2025 car means Newey\u2019s skills have been deployed to work on the new regulations incoming for \u201926, with F1 moving away from the current ground-effect machines and into a modern iteration of active aerodynamics.<\/p>\n
Newey has proven particularly adept at nailing regulation changes, with his 1998 McLaren MP4\/13 proving dominant at the start of that year, while his 2009 Red Bull RB5 out-developed the title-winning BrawnGP car to finish the season as the quickest, before his next four cars wrapped up every title.<\/p>\n
Over 30 years ago, Newey was also the chief designer of the dominant Williams FW14B, which boasted sophisticated active aerodynamics, powering Nigel Mansell to his Drivers\u2019 Championship win in 1992.<\/p>\n
As might be expected, there\u2019s plenty of excitement about what Newey might produce for Aston Martin<\/a> as Lawrence Stroll\u2019s team starts reaching the point of starting to seek a return for the huge financial investment and infrastructure overhaul the former Jordan and Force India squad has undergone in the last few years.<\/p>\n Andy Cowell took over as team principal for 2025, with the former Mercedes engine boss convinced by the strength of Stroll\u2019s project sufficiently to come out of a five-year sabbatical to take on a new career challenge.<\/p>\n As a hugely successful engineer himself, Cowell says he can see the excitement building amongst the aerodynamic design departments at Aston Martin, as he revealed that a raft of different designs are in the wind tunnel \u2013 which, as a brand-new facility, is only online a few months.<\/p>\n \u201cI think everybody\u2019s enjoying the challenge of working on different, new, more adventurous components,\u201d Cowell told PlanetF1.com in an exclusive interview during the Hungarian Grand Prix.<\/p>\n \u201cThe wind tunnel team has responded tremendously to Adrian\u2019s arrival, where we\u2019re trying an awful lot of different architectural ideas, which are bigger changes to the wind tunnel model than normal.<\/p>\n \u201cThe time from Adrian\u2019s drawing board to a wind tunnel run is a third of what it was originally.<\/p>\n \u201cYou chat to the people, and they\u2019re excited about it; they\u2019re enjoying working on something different.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re enjoying being on the battlefield as we make progress with all of this.\u201d<\/p>\n While Newey starts to make his mark on the AMR26, Cowell admitted there\u2019s not yet any way to gauge where Aston Martin is relative to the competition. Given the regulations for chassis and aero, as well as the power unit, are being completely overhauled, there simply is no benchmark to aim for just yet.<\/p>\n It\u2019s for this reason, Cowell explained, that the targets have been set at a very high level.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re focused on running our own race to the first race. It\u2019s a challenging journey for us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWorking with Honda for the first time, this organisation, it\u2019s useful that Adrian\u2019s worked with Honda before, working with Aramco and on the fuel and lubricants, our own transmission and hydraulics.<\/p>\n \u201cSo there are lots of new relationships, lots of new technologies to get on top of, as well as the change in aerodynamic regulation. There are an awful lot of key elements that are being worked on. We are setting ourselves tough targets.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you set yourself a tough target, you tend to be fighting all the way to the end in order to hit those targets. If it isn\u2019t a fight all the way to the end, then you\u2019ve not set a tough target. So I believe we have set tough targets.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are fighting to hit deadlines to release information.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got an amazing operations group that makes a considerable amount of the race car for us now, and we\u2019ve also got an amazing supply chain that is reacting to our requests, and all those requests are to make more complex bits than we\u2019ve ever made before in less lead time with an improvement in quality and precision.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd it\u2019s an exciting journey, quite frankly, throughout the business.\u201d<\/p>\n How F1 2026 is shaping up<\/p>\n \ud83d\udc49 F1 2026: Confirmed teams and power unit suppliers for F1\u2019s huge regulation changes<\/a><\/p>\n