Aston Martin has no plans to draw Adrian Newey’s attention away from focusing on its new car for next year, despite its difficult start to the 2025 season.
Newey, the most successful car designer in F1 history, started work at Aston Martin in March following his exit from Red Bull after almost 20 years with the team, playing a role in the design of all its title-winning cars.
The timing of Newey’s arrival meant he would be too late to have any direct impact on the design of the 2025 launch car, meaning once he was up to speed with how the team worked, the upcoming regulation change for 2026 would warrant his primary focus.
But Aston Martin has made a slow start to the new season, scoring only 10 points in the first four races, and it has struggled to contend with the teams in the upper midfield on a consistent basis.
When I asked Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell yesterday in Jeddah if any thought was being given to pulling him onto the 2025 project, Cowell said:
💬 “One hundred percent of Adrian’s designing time is focused on ’26…He’s focused largely on the tools we’ve been using rather than any direct performance aspect for the ’25 car.”
Cowell explained the early debut of the 2026 cars — the first preseason test is expected to take place at the end of January — plus the total overhaul of the rulebook with zero carryover from the current cars meant there was “lots of work there, and Adrian has just been focused on that.”
Newey’s feedback to Aston Martin on its design processes will naturally benefit its 2025 project, and Cowell said he was already seeing the chief technical officer help push the team on:
💬 “He is of course though, pushing for us to improve the way we operate in the tunnel, the way we operate with CFD, the way we operate with lap simulations.
“So pretty much everything, Adrian’s got thoughts on how to improve, and that’s the great thing of Adrian’s competitive drive, and he balances it up very well in ‘that bit’s fine, it’s this bit we need to work on.’”