Aston Martin boss Andy Cowell said the team is “not happy” with its performances in F1 2025.

He confesses the team’s situation would have been eased if Aston Martin had allowed F1 design guru Adrian Newey to work on the AMR25, but it sees far greater benefit investing in the years to come.

Adrian Newey and Aston Martin: A recipe for success?

Newey has established his reputation as one of the greatest designers Formula 1 has ever seen. A total of 26 World Championships have been won with cars created under his watch.

Williams, McLaren and Red Bull all appear on Newey’s CV as teams which he has tasted title glory with. Could Aston Martin be next?

Newey arrived in March, but has not been working on the current Aston Martin car. Instead, his focus has been F1 2026, the point where major rule changes will be felt.

The cars are due to get smaller and lighter, with new engines also on the way. Those will feature a 50/50 split between electrical power and an internal combustion engine, which will run on sustainable biofuel.

Elsewhere, DRS is to be scrapped as active aerodynamics take over. The Pirelli tyres will also become narrower by 25 millimeters at the front and 30mm at the rear.

Aston Martin has chosen to deploy 100 per cent of the Newey magic into these new rules, even if that compromises what could be achieved in F1 2025 and leaves the team “not happy” with the current situation.

Nonetheless, Aston Martin’s fortunes have turned in recent rounds.

An impressive Hungarian Grand Prix performance yielded a P5 result for Fernando Alonso and seventh for Lance Stroll. That helped lift Aston Martin to sixth in the Constructors’ Championship at the summer break.

“This year is hugely challenging because we’re here, and what we really want is to have the quickest car. And if ’26 wasn’t there, we would definitely have a quicker car today,” Aston Martin CEO and team principal Andy Cowell told RN365.

“If, from the first of March, Adrian had put all his efforts into improving the ’25 car, [I’m] absolutely certain that we would be further up the grid today.

“But we’re not doing that, we’re focusing on ’26 onwards, because the investment will pay off over more racing seasons, over more events.

“And that’s challenging. On a Sunday evening… Saturday after qualifying, Sunday after a race, we’re not happy. Monday morning, we’re not happy. And then you get into the jobs list, and crack on.”

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But Aston Martin is clearly doing something right. The team has failed to score points only once in the last six grands prix.

That outlier was Belgium, where Aston Martin suddenly fell towards the foot of the order. The next weekend in Hungary, they became a surprise dark horse for pole and collected 16 points.

Aston Martin’s former strategy chief Bernie Collins may have discovered the secret to the team’s surge. She is pointing towards the front wing.

“They appear to have just brought a new front wing. The running discussion in the paddock is they’re running a new front wing with an old floor,” said Collins on the Sky F1 podcast.

“Some of it will be circuit-specific, but the turnaround has been phenomenal, given we have been at high-downforce tracks this year, and the car has performed nothing like it did this weekend.

“So, something in their new front wing — and it’s hard, I guess, for people to realise that just one component or one assembly can make such a big difference to car performance — but if the old front wing, something about how the air was flowing off that, affects the remainder of the car.

“So if the old front wing — maybe the wing was working, but it wasn’t allowing components in the floor to work, then a single component like the front wing may allow better airflow to the rest of the car.

“Suddenly, the whole floor is working better, the diffuser’s working better, the rear wing’s working better.

“So just getting one assembly correct — particularly front wing or a front brake duct, anything like that that’s affecting a lot of the airflow further back in the car — it can turn your performance around quite quickly.”

She added: “We need to go to more circuits to see that that holds across a range of downforce levels. But such positive signs for Aston Martin.

“I think they were a team that had sort of written off their year because the car just wasn’t working. Alonso was very unhappy.

“That’s really positive for them and gives them positive data going forward in terms of what they’re working on in the wind tunnel, what they’re working on in fluid dynamics, what they’re working on in the simulator.

“If they can understand why the car worked this weekend, that gives them a lot of confidence in their design work going forward.”

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