Newey opens up on debut Aston Martin design and how team have ‘risen to the challenge’

F1 design legend and Aston Martin Team Principal Adrian Newey has spoken about the process behind his maiden creation for the squad, the AMR26, and how the entire workforce “rose to the challenge” in preparing it.

Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso completed their first laps in the car at last week’s Barcelona Shakedown, with Aston Martin taking to the track on the final two days of the gathering after a particularly busy winter that also marked the start of a works Honda engine deal.

According to Newey, who joined Aston Martin as Managing Technical Partner last March, just before their new wind tunnel became fully operational, the team faced “a very compressed timescale and an extremely busy 10 months” to get the all-new challenger ready.

“2026 is probably the first time in the history of F1 that the power unit regulations and chassis regulations have changed at the same time,” said Newey in an interview for the official Aston Martin website. “It’s a completely new set of rules, which is a big challenge for all the teams, but perhaps more so for us.

“The reality is that we didn’t get a model of the ‘26 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April, whereas most, if not all of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year.

“That put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle. The car only came together at the last minute, which is why we were fighting to make it to the Barcelona Shakedown.”

Asked to break the core elements of the design down, he continued: “It starts with the overall packaging of the car: where is the car carried over the wheelbase, where are the main masses carried.

“Then it’s worked through to the front and rear suspension – the front and rear suspension both have their own very important part to play in that manipulation of the flow field. You’ve got the front wing and the nose shape, which are somewhat different this year. You keep moving through to the sidepods, and the treatment around the rear of the car, which is certainly different to what we’ve done previously.

“Now, whether other people come up with a similar solution to ours, we don’t know and we won’t until we start seeing other people’s cars. We’ve just tried to pursue what we think is the correct direction for us. Other people might have pursued other directions. It’s part of the excitement of new regulations, seeing what everybody comes up with.”

With several rivals already taking note of the car, Newey admitted “the direction we’ve taken could certainly be interpreted as aggressive”, given “it’s got quite a few features that haven’t necessarily been done before”, while pointing to one of his trademarks.

“The car is tightly packaged – much more tightly packaged than I believe has been attempted at Aston Martin Aramco before,” he commented.

“This has required a very close working relationship with the mechanical designers to achieve the aerodynamic shapes we wanted, but I have to say that all the mechanical designers here have really embraced that philosophy. It hasn’t made their life easy, quite the opposite, but they’ve really risen to the challenge.”

As for what to expect from the AMR26 at the start of the season, and what might be to come in terms of updates, Newey said: “We’ve attempted to build something that we hope will have quite a lot of development potential.

“What you want to try to avoid is a car that comes out quite optimised within its window but lacks a lot of development potential. We’ve tried to do the opposite, which is why we’ve really focused on the fundamentals, put our effort into those, knowing that some of the appendages – wings, bodywork, things that can be changed in season – will hopefully have development potential.”