'Not fit for purpose' – Adrian Newey on structural problems behind Aston Martin's 2026 F1 disaster
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Adrian Newey says Aston Martin's tools and procedures have not been up to standard as he details the squad's disastrous 2026 campaign.
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Aston was barely able to run in testing and over the first few rounds of the 2026 season largely due to huge reliability problems with its Honda power unit. But once it did get meaningful running, it became clear the AMR26 itself also hasn't been up to standard, being both significantly overweight and lacking downforce.
Read Also: Adrian Newey hopes Aston Martin upgrades keep Fernando Alonso "in the cockpit for another season"The team previously admitted it had started its 2026 development several months behind its rivals, with its car not hitting the wind tunnel until April 2025. But beyond those delays, Newey said several other key weaknesses at its Silverstone factory further derailed its 2026 project, leading to a season in which the team is now well behind newcomer Cadillac as F1's slowest runner.
"Timing was a huge part of it, but not the only part," Newey told the Aston Martin website. "We've got a very talented group of people, but as an organisation we weren't yet working together as well as you would like and operating as one cohesive unit. Expectations were sky‑high, but the reality of where we were didn't match that.
"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."
Adrian Newey says his team has relied on tools that have been
Adrian Newey says his team has relied on tools that have beenOld tools in a new shell
Aston started moving into a brand-new, state-of-the-art headquarters in Silverstone in May 2023. But inside the shiny new factory, Newey found that a lot of the underlying fundamentals at the team were still antiquated or not synced up properly.
"We were relying on tools and processes that had been patched and bodged for years – you could trace some of them right back to the very early days of the Jordan team that was based here in Silverstone, long before Aston Martin returned to the grid," he explained. "At some point, a system that's just patch‑on‑patch stops being fit for purpose. That's where we had got to.
"The result was a very frustrating car build. Parts weren't being ordered at the right time – not because people weren't doing their jobs, but because the underlying system was failing them."
Alongside a car revamp coming for Hungary next month, which should yield significant aero gains and weight loss, the squad has also made fundamental changes to avoid a repeat of its 2026 nadir in the future, which includes bringing more production in-house instead of relying on subcontractors.
The team will roll out a B-spec car in Hungary
The team will roll out a B-spec car in Hungary"We've taken this difficult spell as an opportunity to overhaul how we work," Newey said. "We're making big strides in our 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. 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."
But that effort won't bear fruit overnight, so Newey isn't expecting to see the results until later this year.
Read Also: Fernando Alonso confident of progress despite Aston Martin's gap to Cadillac in Austria qualifying What’s behind Honda and Aston Martin’s F1 “team gathering” in Barcelona? The Adrian Newey quality that keeps Aston Martin believing"Historically, at this team, there hasn't been enough investment in engineering simulation tools – not just project management systems, but the core physics tools themselves," he added. "We're putting that investment in now, but you don't rewrite and validate those tools overnight. Correlating them properly with the real car takes time.
"At the moment, they're improving, but the real gains from that work will come later in the year."
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