Andy Cowell believes Adrian Newey's first trackside appearance for Aston Martin in Monaco will unlock a greater understanding of where it must improve.
Newey joined Aston as managing technical partner in March, but has been factory-based across the opening seven rounds of the season, designing the 2026 car which the team hopes will move it into championship contention.
The AMR25 machine has not been as competitive as the team hoped, with Fernando Alonso still to get off the mark, with Lance Stroll notching 14 points, but Newey's influence over this car has been minimal.
As the team continues to grow, Cowell believes having the presence of the most successful designer in F1 history in trackside engineering meetings and in the garage will help the team to uncover where its strengths and weaknesses currently are.
"When Adrian joined at the beginning of March, we said: 'We need Adrian to focus on 2026 and the architecture of the car, which is what he's primarily been focused on," Cowell told media, including RacingNews365.
"Lunchtime conversations have not just included what he's eating or what he's been doing at the weekend, it has included conversations about about 2025 car and what might be the issues, but it is a separate engineering team who have been working on the 2025 car.
"As he has been working on the 2026 car, he gets to see the tools that we've got, specifically the CFD, the wind-tunnel and the whole journey of information from drawing board to wind-tunnel results.
"With that, we learn about what are strengths are, what our weaknesses are and then how we maintain our strengths and improve our weaknesses, so he has been doing that at the factory.
"He's here, he'll see the way we operate in a race weekend environment, the way we optimise the car and having his experience and insight.
"He'll be looking to see what is going well and what is not, it just helps with our jobs and lists of what to work on to become a stronger team."
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Newey's first race for Aston Martin
When then pushed by RacingNews365, Cowell spoke of Newey's all-round "genius" and if he had been surprised by anything the former Red Bull chief technical officer had done.
"On the 2026 architecture, he is probably one of the few engineers in the sport who can look at the whole aspect of the car," he added.
"It is not just aerodynamic genius, it is car architectural genius, to push every last bit of detail, including thinking about how you would change the set-up in a compact FP1, FP2, FP3.
"He is covering the whole spectrum of a successful championship season."
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