Will ‘genius’ Newey turn Aston Martin into winners?

Adrian Newey is the Formula 1 design genius with the Midas touch.

The 65-year-old sprinkles his stardust on an F1 team and it tends to make the difference between good and great.

That is exactly what Aston Martin owner Lawrence Stroll hopes he has bought with what is said to be a £30m package that has tempted Newey to join a team struggling in fifth place in the World Championship.

Will Newey be the decisive factor that turns Aston Martin into winners? Stroll certainly believes so, and the vibe at the team’s factory on Tuesday when Newey was announced suggests he is not the only one.

Stroll described the money he is paying Newey as “a bargain”, and said he has “never been more certain” about a decision he made during 30 years in business.

“It is relatively inexpensive for everything Adrian brings,” the Canadian billionaire said.

Stroll has already invested hundreds of millions in a state-of-the-art new factory and wind tunnel at the team’s base across the road from Silverstone Circuit, and an engineering team packed with big names.

Newey is both the icing on the cake and potentially the single most important ingredient of that investment.

That new factory was part of what attracted Newey to Aston Martin, the man regarded as the greatest F1 designer in history said on Tuesday at the news conference to announce his new job.

Newey described the facility as “just stunning – it is not an easy thing to do to build a brand new factory on a brand new site and have a really nice warm, creative feel to it. Because that is what we’re here for – to be creative, to come up with good solutions and have good communication.

“I’ve seen some new buildings that haven’t quite fulfilled that. I am so looking forward to starting.”

Another part of Newey’s decision was the fact that, with Stroll as owner and a constant presence, Aston Martin feels to him as if it is “back to the old model” of an F1 team.

“If you go back 20 years,” Newey said, “then what we now call team principal were the owners, and in this modern era Lawrence is unique in being the only properly active team owner. It is a different feeling when you have someone like Lawrence involved like that.”

The money is a bonus, of course, but with Newey it has never been about the money. “I still love the challenge of trying to add performance to the car,” he said. “That is my prime motivation and what gets me up in the morning.”

Newey’s reputation goes before him – 12 drivers’ championships and 13 constructors’ titles for three different teams over a 30-year period tell a powerful story.

Whether joining Williams in 1990, McLaren in 1997 or Red Bull in 2005, Newey’s presence has been the catalyst for a period of dominance. Two, in the case of Red Bull.

The evidence of the power of Newey’s influence can already been seen by virtue of its absence at Red Bull this year.

Newey was last plugged into the F1 team in Miami back in May. Since then, as he counts down the days to what he calls his “new challenge”, Newey has been working on selling his RB17 hypercar, and Red Bull have started to struggle.

They look likely to lose the constructors’ championship to McLaren. And Max Verstappen has even started to express concern about losing the drivers’ title, despite his current 62-point lead.

That cannot all be down to Newey’s absence, of course. But some of Red Bull’s apparent lack of understanding of how to fix their car’s problems surely will be, for Newey combines a genius for aerodynamics with unrivalled experience, great expertise and insight as a race engineer, and what Damon Hill describes as a “unique gift” for understanding what drivers need from their cars.

Newey will, he says, be full-time at Aston Martin when he starts work in early March. At Red Bull he has also spent time on other projects in recent years.

Before and since Newey left, there have been attempts to play down his involvement in Red Bull’s success over the past few years.

It was well known that among Newey’s reasons for leaving Red Bull was his annoyance that some in the team were trying to claim credit where he believed it was due to him.

And when he was asked on Tuesday why he had decided to go full-time at Aston Martin when he had chosen to be on something like three days a week at Red Bull, he said: “I don’t know where three days a week came from.” Except of course he does.

He emphasised that as soon as Honda joined as engine partner in 2018 “I got properly involved on the F1 side [again]”, and only “felt able to sit back a little once we got through the design of the 2022 car because the 2023 and this year’s car were very much evolutions of that first car”.

Newey has his work cut out at Aston Martin. As he pointed out, the new aerodynamics rules for 2026 will be released at the beginning of January, and he does not start work until March.

“It will be a case of getting myself up to speed as quickly as possible, and just as importantly getting to know everyone here as quickly as possible, and how we get the best out of each other,” he said.

“They [the new rules] are an opportunity. Whether we will be able to capitalise on that, we just don’t know. I don’t spend too long fretting on these things. Just get on and do the best we can.”

How will he perform his role as managing technical partner? He joins forces again with technical director Dan Fallows, who was head of aerodynamics at Red Bull under Newey before joining Aston Martin in early 2022.

Newey, Fallows said on Tuesday, “goes where he thinks he can add value”. He draws the fundamentals of the car layout on his fabled drawing board, analyses reports, sits in some meetings, and contributes and asks questions and guides where he feels it is needed.

Newey is a brilliant man, but he is not an egotist. He is happy to embrace any engineering idea, whatever its provenance, as long as it makes the car faster.

And just his mere presence will energise belief in the team.

Fernando Alonso, whose contract lasts until the end of 2026, has waited more than 20 years to finally get a chance to work with Newey, and has been deprived of at least two world titles by the Englishman’s genius.

Newey jokingly called Alonso an “arch-rival” over many years. Alonso said: “I would say Adrian was more an inspiration thanks to his talent and cars. We all got better as a driver, as engineers; we all had to raise the bar thanks to him, to be able to compete.”

If history is anything to go by, that bar may be about to be raised again.