Aston Martin’s ‘more adventurous’ wind tunnel work as immediate Adrian Newey impact uncovered

Adrian Newey’s arrival at Aston Martin has seen the team’s wind tunnel personnel ‘respond tremendously’ as excitement kicks in ahead of F1 2026.

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.

Andy Cowell: Aston Martin trying ‘different architectural ideas’ in the wind tunnel

Newey left his previous role as Red Bull’s chief technical officer in May 2024, before taking up his new position as managing technical partner at Aston Martin earlier this year.

While the AMR25 hasn’t been hugely competitive this year, the short-term nature of improvements to the 2025 car means Newey’s skills have been deployed to work on the new regulations incoming for ’26, with F1 moving away from the current ground-effect machines and into a modern iteration of active aerodynamics.

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.

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’ Championship win in 1992.

As might be expected, there’s plenty of excitement about what Newey might produce for Aston Martin as Lawrence Stroll’s 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.

Andy Cowell took over as team principal for 2025, with the former Mercedes engine boss convinced by the strength of Stroll’s project sufficiently to come out of a five-year sabbatical to take on a new career challenge.

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 – which, as a brand-new facility, is only online a few months.

“I think everybody’s enjoying the challenge of working on different, new, more adventurous components,” Cowell told PlanetF1.com in an exclusive interview during the Hungarian Grand Prix.

“The wind tunnel team has responded tremendously to Adrian’s arrival, where we’re trying an awful lot of different architectural ideas, which are bigger changes to the wind tunnel model than normal.

“The time from Adrian’s drawing board to a wind tunnel run is a third of what it was originally.

“You chat to the people, and they’re excited about it; they’re enjoying working on something different.

“They’re enjoying being on the battlefield as we make progress with all of this.”

While Newey starts to make his mark on the AMR26, Cowell admitted there’s 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.

It’s for this reason, Cowell explained, that the targets have been set at a very high level.

“We’re focused on running our own race to the first race. It’s a challenging journey for us,” he said.

“Working with Honda for the first time, this organisation, it’s useful that Adrian’s worked with Honda before, working with Aramco and on the fuel and lubricants, our own transmission and hydraulics.

“So 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.

“If 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’t a fight all the way to the end, then you’ve not set a tough target. So I believe we have set tough targets.

“We are fighting to hit deadlines to release information.

“We’ve got an amazing operations group that makes a considerable amount of the race car for us now, and we’ve also got an amazing supply chain that is reacting to our requests, and all those requests are to make more complex bits than we’ve ever made before in less lead time with an improvement in quality and precision.

“And it’s an exciting journey, quite frankly, throughout the business.”

How F1 2026 is shaping up

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During a visit to the Aston Martin factory during the British Grand Prix weekend, well outside of usual working hours, Newey could be seen in his design office, hard at work.

His glass-encased office is visible to everyone on the design floor, and, from the reverential whisper the factory tour guide took, the effort he’s putting in to hit the ground running with his new team has been noticed as he leads by example.

Even for someone as experienced and successful as Cowell, having the services of F1’s most successful car designer building your next car is giddying, even if he hides it well.

“Adrian is of huge value in many aspects,” he said.

“His enthusiasm for getting into the detail of the race car architecture, and his focus, the trance that he goes into as he’s looking at that detail, but also the breadth of his experience.

“So he’s not only looking at the fundamental architecture of the car, he’s also looking at the structural optimisation of the car and the manufacturing methods that we should use for maximising stiffness, minimising weight, and the culture as well; that we’re here to win culture.

“When we have a bad race weekend, should we, on a Monday, be happy?

“No, we should be thinking we’ve missed out. We’re a team that wants to get to the position where we have a race car and an organisation that’s capable of winning races. If we haven’t achieved that post-race, we should be reflecting and reminding ourselves of what is needed to achieve that, and questioning every area.

“Adrian’s great at just picking out, ‘Yeah, but what about those? What about that? What about the whole aspect?’

“So he’s adding great engineering insight, but also a huge amount of experience as to what a winning culture is in Formula 1.”

Of course, after four years of rebuilding and revitalisation of personnel and facilities at the Silverstone factory that is home to Aston Martin’s F1 efforts, Cowell is all too aware that the pressure is on for F1 2026.

While this season, and the last couple, have been with an eye to the future, that future is just a few short months away, and the all-new regulation cycle will kick off in a closed-door shakedown test in Barcelona in January.

Is it time for Aston Martin to stop being a team with potential, and start delivering on the potential of what has been built?

“I think we’ve got the right pieces,” Cowell summed up.

“I think they’re taking the right shape and fitting together better than they did before, but I don’t think even a championship-winning organisation can say that all the pieces fit together perfectly.

“I will never say that anything’s perfect. I will always say that it can get better, and I imagine that there’ll be the odd piece that we need to add into the jigsaw puzzle as we go along, so we’re making great progress.

“The determination is there, the vision is there, everything that we think of we can introduce, every bit that we want to improve on.

“From Adrian’s comments of where great is, we’re lifting our targets and our expectations to be above great, and we’re working hard to get there as quickly as possible in record time.”

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