Adrian Newey explains Aston Martin 'wake up call' after costly F1 delay

Adrian Newey has explained the "wake-up call" that hit Aston Martin at the Australian Grand Prix after delays in its car build process.

Newey joined Aston Martin to much fanfare as managing technical partner in Spring 2025 from Red Bull, but the AMR26 machine, the first to be designed by him for the team, has proven to be off the pace, with the team often finding itself at the bottom of the timesheets.

There have been problems with the Honda power unit and vibrations, before Fernando Alonso charted issues with the new in-house gearbox in Miami and Monaco, where the car would lose gear-sync at low speed.

The car has yet to be upgraded since the start of the season, with a major package planned for before the summer break, as Newey explained how the late starting process of the design of the "bold" 2026 car had impacted the team, with rivals putting their designs in the wind tunnel from January 1st, 2025.

"On both the chassis side and the power unit side, we've been on the back foot from the start. In hindsight, we probably put too much expectation on ourselves – and of course, you must never forget the quality of the opposition you're up against across the grid," Newey told Aston MartinF1.com. 

"We didn't start serious work on the '26 car until mid-March 2025 and didn't get a model into the wind tunnel until mid‑April. That left us several months behind our rivals – and that's a huge gap to close.

"On the chassis side, we're quite a long way overweight. Some of that comes from integrating the power unit and dealing with vibration issues we've had to work through with Honda, but we also didn't do as good a job as we should have on our side at saving weight," 

"When you design in a rush, weight is the first thing that suffers because you don't have the time to thoroughly optimise everything.

"Aerodynamically, we also took a bold direction – which was largely pushed by me – without the luxury of exploring multiple concepts in depth because time was against us. 

"I wouldn't say the direction we've taken is fundamentally wrong, but it has thrown up challenges we didn't anticipate.

"Melbourne was the wake‑up call. Because of various power unit challenges, our first proper running was actually Free Practice Three at the Australian Grand Prix. 

"Before that, in Barcelona and at the two Bahrain tests, we spent too much time in the garage just trying to get the power unit to run correctly with the chassis and gearbox.

"You know the idiom, 'it never rains, but it pours', and this is one of those classic cases where it felt like everything that could go wrong did go wrong."