Adrian Newey: Aston Martin’s signing of legendary F1 designer raises hope of 2026 title contention | F1 News

Aston Martin have won the race to sign legendary Formula 1 designer Adrian Newey in a move that could have huge implications.

Newey, widely considered to be the greatest engineer in the sport’s history having designed 14 championship-winning cars over the last 32 years, will join Aston Martin in March 2025 after officially ending a 19-year stint with Red Bull.

The move is arguably more significant than any driver change, including one as seismic as Lewis Hamilton’s upcoming switch from Mercedes to Ferrari, given success in F1 is ultimately dictated more by the cars than their pilots.

Aston Martin are only fifth in the Constructors’ Championship heading into the final stretch of what has been an underwhelming campaign, but the addition of Newey will only increase hopes that they can compete for titles when new regulations are introduced for the 2026 season.

Ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, where Newey will be confirmed to join Aston Martin in a press conference at 11am, Sky Sports F1 assess whether he is the final jigsaw piece in the puzzle that is the Silverstone-based squad’s quest for glory.

Why is Newey so special?

All of F1’s top teams were believed to hold some interest in signing Newey after Red Bull announced in May this year that he would leave the team in early 2025 and had stopped working on their 2024 F1 car with immediate effect.

Despite stories of McLaren and Mercedes interest, Ferrari and Aston Martin were the only serious contenders, with Newey finally making his decision towards the end of the summer.

Newey has loved designing race cars since his childhood and still plans all his F1 car designs on a drawing board.

The advancement of technology sees most engineers use CAD (computer-aided design) systems but Newey still gets out his pencil and draws.

His ability to envision the air flow produced by a hugely complex F1 car and how to maximise downforce is something that simply can’t be taught.

“He lives in the matrix,” said Red Bull team principal Christian Horner in 2022.

“He’s been the conductor of the technical orchestra for all these years now. He’s still very hands on, he’s still at his drawing board. I think it’s probably the only drawing board in Formula 1, I had to argue with Ron Dennis to wrestle it out of McLaren.

“Obviously highs and lows during all these years but it’s always been fun. It’s always been about the racing.”

Newey’s departure from the Red Bull F1 team at the start of May coincided with the field suddenly catching up to the world champions, with just three wins having come in the 11 races since the announcement.

Red Bull appear to have gone down the wrong development path and some in the paddock have questioned whether Newey’s absence has been a significant factor.

“I think we would have had these issues because they were already there. One man’s input could never be so dramatic so quickly,” said Horner after the Italian Grand Prix earlier this month.

“This started to really highlight itself in Miami. Adrian was working until the Friday of Miami, so there’s no way it could have impacted so quickly.

“We are working with the same people. F1 is a team sport and it’s a team issue and the team will come up with a resolution.”

Success with regulation changes

Newey has been designing championship-winning cars since 1992 and made some of the most dominant machines in F1 history during his time at Williams, McLaren and Red Bull.

Among his many strengths, arguably his biggest is when it comes to regulation changes and that’s where Aston Martin will be rubbing their hands with excitement, given the new rules coming in 2026.

In 1998, F1 moved to narrower cars and McLaren won both the drivers’ and constructors’ titles, with Mika Hakkinen becoming a double world champion in 1999.

Fast forward to 2009 and Red Bull suddenly became front-runners for the first time as Newey got on top of a big regulation change. If it wasn’t for Brawn’s genius double diffuser, Red Bull would likely have been champions that year.

Instead, Sebastian Vettel waited a season and went on to win four consecutive titles between 2010 and 2013, with Red Bull also winning the constructors’ championship in those years.

More recently, Red Bull reigned supreme once more when ground effect cars returned in 2022, with Max Verstappen enjoying an unprecedented spell of dominance.

Verstappen won a record-breaking 15 races in 2022, then followed it up with a remarkable 19 victories in 2023 including a record streak of 10 in a row.

During other years when there were major rule changes, Newey still built good cars which won races. It’s not a guarantee that having Newey means a team will be at least fighting for victories, but history suggests the chances of competing at the front at extremely high.

Assembling a dream-team

Newey is not the first big technical signing Lawrence Stroll has made since rebranding the Racing Point team he bought as Aston Martin in 2021.

Technical director Dan Fallows joined the team in 2022 from Red Bull and will be reunited with Newey. Fallows headed up the aerodynamics team at Red Bull during their period of dominance between 2010 and 2013, so should be comfortable working alongside Newey once more.

Aston Martin have also signed Enrico Cardile from Ferrari for 2025 as their chief technical officer. Cardile was in charge of aerodynamics at Ferrari and will bring further expertise to their Silverstone factory.

Another recent eye-catching appointment was former Mercedes engine guru Andy Cowell, who will replace the outgoing Martin Whitmarsh in October as chief executive officer.

Cowell was instrumental in Mercedes’ success when the F1 turbo-hybrid era began in 2014, leading the design of an engine that enabled the Silver Arrows to win eight successive constructors’ titles.

There’s no point building a great car without having an elite driver to extract the best from it, and Aston Martin have had one in place since signing Fernando Alonso at the start 2023.

The Spaniard in April signed a two-year contract extension that ties him to the team until the end of the 2026 season, and will be hoping to get a real opportunity to finally add to the two drivers’ titles he won in 2005 and 2006.

You could argue the weakest part of Aston Martin’s likely 2026 structure would be Alonso’s team-mate Lance Stroll, who appears to have an unconditional seat with the team while his father remains the owner.

If Aston do produce a title contending car in 2026, there is little doubt some of the sport’s other elite drivers will have their agents sounding out the possibility of a 2027 drive.

All eyes on Aston Martin for 2026

Aston Martin have fallen away from the leading pack after a promising 2023 when Fernando Alonso scored eight podiums and finished fourth in the drivers’ standings.

But, in the background, Aston Martin have opened a new factory and wind tunnel at their state of the art Silverstone base.

“It allows us to do much more of our own testing in the way that we want, and it just gives us much more flexibility than we have at the moment,” Fallows said. “There’s been, you know, lots of examples of things that we would have liked to have done that we weren’t able to do. There’s a reason we spend millions and millions of pounds on these things.”

From 2026, Aston Martin will be the only team to run power units provided by Honda, the Japanese manufacturer who have supplied Red Bull’s engines during their recent dominant streak.

Honda had a nightmare return to F1 as an engine manufacturer under McLaren in 2015, with regular reliability issues and a huge lack of performance but joined forces with Red Bull in 2019 and have been on the rise since.

The thrilling 2021 season showcased Honda had the joint-best power unit along with Mercedes, which certainly helped Verstappen in the title race against Lewis Hamilton.

Red Bull had the best straight line speed by far in the early stages of 2023 and they are still up there when it comes to top speed.

“[There have been] a lot of meetings with Honda, as you can imagine, in preparation for 2026, both face-to-face and also online,” said Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough. “Their presence is very much within our team now, and yeah, just a huge amount of work that we’re going through, a lot of change.

“The company, the team’s grown. We’re very much looking forward to 2026. We’ve still got this year and next year to focus on, too.”

Ultimately, it will only be at the opening race of the 2026 season when it becomes clear whether Aston Martin’s dream-team have achieved their goal, but expectations have just been heightened dramatically.

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