Adrian Newey will appear for the first time in the green “Aston Martin” uniform during the Monte Carlo weekend. Eight months after the announcement that formalized his new professional venture, ‘Genius’ took stock in an interview published by the team on the eve of the first European weekend of the 2025 Formula 1 season. “When you join a new team, it’s always hard to know what kind of experience awaits you. Every time I’ve faced this situation, I’ve ended up having a different experience than the previous one. They’ve welcomed me very well, and I want to say that this hasn’t always been the case…”
Newey’s new challenge began in an unfamiliar setting, as his arrival at Aston Martin coincided with many other hires. “In terms of staff, the team has grown a lot in a short time. We have excellent facilities, the personnel are motivated and enthusiastic. In the end, F1 is all about people: there’s a lot of technology, but it’s the people who make things work. The first goal is to build a winning mentality, because if you operate in a team that hasn’t had much success over the years, not winning becomes the norm. It’s important to build confidence in ourselves and in the belief that we have the collective ability to succeed. That said, I want to make it clear that I’m not a cheerleader, nor an American football coach who stands in front of everyone in a room to give a stirring speech. It’s about working and growing together.”
Under Lawrence Stroll’s management, the Silverstone headquarters has been transformed — the AMR Technology Campus is a cutting-edge facility, equipped with a new simulator and the most advanced wind tunnel in F1. “The facility that Lawrence has created is the best today, but it’s crucial to know how to optimize how everything is used. Again, this is a people sport. At my previous team, we used one of the worst wind tunnels in F1 and operated out of a set of anonymous buildings in an industrial area, but we managed to build a great group of people — everyone always pushed in the same direction.”
It’s no secret that from the moment he stepped into the Silverstone headquarters, Newey’s work has been focused on the 2026 car — a complete technical challenge driven by the new regulations. “What do I think of the new rules? My thoughts are similar to those I had about the big change in 2022. At first, I thought the new technical cycle was very prescriptive, that there wouldn’t be much for a designer to do other than follow the guidelines. Then I started diving into the details and realized there was quite a bit of flexibility, both for innovation and for different approaches. I believe there’s a good chance we’ll see something similar in 2026 to what happened in 2022 — there’s enough flexibility in the regulations, and I’m sure we’ll see different solutions. Then, some of them will be dropped after the first two or three years as teams start to converge.”
There’s also another aspect, promptly pointed out by Adrian Newey, and described as somewhat… unsettling. “For the first time, we’re facing a drastic change in power units along with a major revolution in chassis design. Overall, it’s very interesting, but at the same time also a bit unsettling, because the new regulations as a whole offer various opportunities.” Work on the 2026 car has been underway for some time — no path has initially been ruled out, as Adrian Newey confirms. “We’re exploring several directions, and there are some we still can’t say whether they’ll work or not, but that’s part of the appeal of Formula 1, especially when you’re facing major regulatory changes.”
There are no distractions — Newey’s contribution to the development of the AMR25 project has been practically zero. (“I’ve had some lunchtime conversations with the small group still working on the current car’s development, discussing what we can do about it.”) His days are entirely dedicated to the car that will be on track next season. The routines are always the same — classic Adrian Newey. “I always use a drawing board rather than a CAD system — for me it’s like a language, actually my native language. But if I worked digitally, I’d be slower.”
But it’s not just a matter of speed. “If I have a drawing on the board, say made up of 100 lines, I’ve probably drawn 200 and erased a hundred. I modify things as I develop an idea, and on the board I have everything in front of me — a complete overview. By contrast, the CAD method tends to zoom in on individual components. Obviously, my way of working also has some disadvantages — the biggest one being that everything I do has to be translated. During peak times, there are three people scanning my drawings and entering them into CAD. If there were others in the team working with a drawing board… well, it would be very inefficient.”
After Leyton House, Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, Adrian Newey has taken on the final challenge of his career: replicating at Aston Martin what he achieved at previous teams. “It makes no sense today to fantasize about the future — we need to get to work and commit. A modern F1 car is a very complicated beast — physically complex because of the number of components, but that complexity is multiplied by the number of simulations used to produce it. F1 teams are increasingly dependent on simulation tools: computational fluid dynamics (CFD), wind tunnels, and the correlation between the real car on track and these tools.”
“It’s an area that requires a lot of development. You can buy an off-the-shelf CFD package, but you have to modify it, learn how to use it correctly. Same with a wind tunnel — you can buy the hardware, but then you have to write the software to drive the motion system. The same goes for a driver-in-the-loop simulator: you can have the best motion system in the world, but if you don’t have the right modeling, the connection with the aerodynamic model, the tire model, and so on, it’ll be useless. It takes time — Formula 1 is 5% inspiration, 95% perspiration. It’s an engineering discipline with a creative side, but it has to be creative for an engineering reason — that is, to make the car go faster. That combination is what makes it so fascinating.”
The date is set for Monte Carlo, when he will enter the paddock for the first time in Aston Martin colors, always with his trusty notebook in hand. “To be honest, the notebook is just a container with lots of A4 paper scraps. Usually, they’re sketches, ideas, thoughts — a way to quickly put down the ideas that are spinning in my head. It’s also a way to communicate them, but I have to ‘translate’ them. I think they’re probably incomprehensible to anyone else. Actually, I confess that sometimes they’re incomprehensible even to me…”
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