Adrian Newey admits one Aston Martin mistake as upgrade countdown begins

Aston Martin team boss Adrian Newey has said he is “guilty” of having not spent enough time engaging with Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll through his squad’s difficult start to 2026.

Aston Martin has struggled for any sort of competitiveness through the first half of the 2026 season, with a late start and reliability issues putting the team on the back foot.

Adrian Newey admits he should have spent more time with Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll

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Newey’s team has scored just a solitary point so far in 2026, courtesy of an unlikely 10th place finish for Fernando Alonso at last month’s Monaco Grand Prix.

Aside from that, Aston Martin has shored up the back of the pack alongside newcomers Cadillac, with the Lawrence Stroll-owned squad failing to hit the ground running at the start of the new regulation cycle.

Part of this was down to a late start on the ’26 car, with managing technical partner and car designer Adrian Newey helming the project after his commencement in the role in March 2025. Later in the summer, Enrico Cardile joined as chief technical officer to bolster the team’s abilities, while Newey also moved to take on the role of team principal as Andy Cowell was moved into a new position.

Earlier this week, Newey commented on the full extent of Aston Martin‘s travails in an illuminating interview with the team’s official website, revealing how it wasn’t until the Australian Grand Prix that it became apparent just how far behind the AMR26 had fallen.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel: a large upgrade package is being rolled out at July’s Hungarian Grand Prix, with revised rear suspension, a newly-homologated chassis front end, new nose, and aerodynamic surfaces. It’s large enough to be considered a ‘B-spec’ car, even if it won’t necessarily bear that formal nomenclature.

Newey opted against offering an idea of how significant the updates may turn out to be in terms of laptime but, with the car also shedding weight to get close to the minimum weight limit, gains of several tenths to a second have been suggested.

On Thursday night at Silverstone, Newey broke away from his drawing board in the Aston Martin factory to speak to assembled guests, partners, and media, including PlanetF1.com, to speak about the upgrades and the approach he’s taken to improving his team’s fortunes.

“First of all, we only really got properly running in FP3 at Melbourne, so we were very much on the back foot through various preseason testing problems, so our learning curve was behind,” he said, to begin his assessment.

“Because it became quite very obvious very quickly that we were not going to be competitive in the early races, so we took the painful – but I believe correct decision – to not do any development through the first half of the year, knowing that that would actually mean we, as everybody else develops, the gap to the front would actually get bigger, not smaller, but with the view to then really getting ourselves better organised.

“Putting lots of different systems into place for the future, and then really doing our research properly, because the 2026 car was done in a very compressed timescale.

“So it’s enabled us to step back a bit, take a bit of pressure off ourselves, because we actually put ourselves under too much pressure over the winter, and take a deep breath and really understand our problems.

“What we need to achieve, both medium term, which will be with this upgrade package that we hope to have ready in Hungary as the first stage, second stage in Zandvoort, and then, long term, meaning decisions that will put us in a stronger place through this coming winter and into the 2027 season.

“So that’s what we’ve done, and thank you everybody for their patience and understanding, because it’s very painful for us, and for everybody and our partners, to see our current performance, but hopefully this will soon be a distant… painful still, but distant memory.”

With both drivers, Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll, clearly frustrated by the situation but, largely, managing to keep those frustrations from boiling over, Newey said he has fully engaged with both recently regarding the upgrades, but admitted that he could have been better about keeping them in the loop earlier.

“You know drivers, they feel, what they drive, and they see what they see at the race track, predominantly, and of course, for them it’s been extremely frustrating to not be able to race competitively with all the problems we’ve had,” he said.

“I took a bit of time two weeks or so ago going through with both Fernando and Lance exactly what we’re doing, what we have planned for the upgrade package, what we have learned through going into the 2027 season, and how we are… whilst it might not seem like it, we are very much listening to their comments and trying to act on them.

“I think if people don’t feel as if they’re being heard, they get very frustrated – it’s a human reaction, so I’ve absolutely been guilty of not spending enough time with Fernando and Lance back here, so I’m going through exactly what we are trying to achieve with the upgrade package, and as I say, going into next season.

“It’s now getting closer, so they’re kind of counting down the pain, and will see what hopefully will be a good step forward.”

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With Newey explaining in his interview that he has worked to overhaul the team’s processes as systems were “failing”the people, he said that there has been “big strides” in in-house facilities and production capabilities.

“You won’t see all the gains immediately, but they’ll be visible on the updated car: many more components are now produced in‑house,” he said.

“The gearbox casing is manufactured here, the floor patterns and floors themselves are made here, and a lot of parts that were previously outsourced have come back in-house.

“That gives us better cost control, but more importantly, much greater flexibility and control over our own destiny.

“Bringing more work in‑house gives us better quality control, better responsiveness and a tighter feedback loop from research to design to manufacture.”

With revolution coming on the car, Newey said there hasn’t been any need to upend the team’s leadership structure to find a more optimal layout, instead suggesting that the right pieces are in place.

“The team principal is… it’s an interpretation,” he said.

“We’ve chosen to interpret it as, yes, I am the team principal, but it’s really the leadership team of Enrico [Cardile, technical director], Paul Field is our COO [chief operation officer], Janet Wessels is our chief people officer, and Robert [Yeowart] as chief financial officer or managing director.

“So it’s that great team, it’s run as a very flat structure, and I think again, whilst you can argue certainly that the results aren’t there at the moment, I do believe that it’s a structure that we want to maintain as a predominantly flat structure.

Of course, flat structures can be compared to socialism, and we all know about the problems of socialism, but that means it’s about having the right people, getting them working together well, and I do truly believe that we can achieve that, and we are achieving that.”

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