Aston Martin boss Andy Cowell has explained the reason for Adrian Newey attending the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix, saying the team will utilise the technical guru’s “experience and insight”.
Newey, who formally joined the British marque in March, has primarily been working back at the team’s Silverstone HQ, getting to grips with the regulations for the forthcoming 2026 campaign.
The 66-year-old recently revealed in an in-house interview with the team that he has been having minor conversations about the AMR25, which has so far yieled just 14 points from the first seven rounds.
Its lack of competitiveness may have prompted Cowell to dispatch Newey to Monaco, who, according to the Team Principal, will also be keeping a keen eye on the general organisation of the its race weekend operations.
“So when Adrian joined at the beginning of March we said, ‘right 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 Motorsport Week.
“Lunchtime conversations have not just included what he’s eating and what he’s been doing at the weekend,” Cowell joked, “it’s also included conversations about our existing car, the ‘25 car and what might be issues.
“But it’s a separate engineering team that have been working on the ‘25 car. As he’s been working on the ‘26 car he gets to see the tools that we’ve got, specifically CFD, wind tunnel, the whole journey of information from a drawing board to wind tunnel results.
“And with that we learn about what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses and then how do we maintain our strengths and improve our weaknesses. So he’s been doing that within the factory.
“This weekend he’s here and he’ll see the way we operate in a race weekend environment, the way we optimise the car we’ve got, the way we play a different strategy and so having his experience and insight looking to see what’s going well, what’s not so well just helps with our jobs list of what to work on to become a stronger team.”
Cowell added that Newey’s experience, insight and creativity “can help the whole team and we need to engineer a faster car, but we need to maximise the performance of it until the very last lap of every race, so his insight and creativity will help absolutely everybody in the team.”
Adrian Newey will help Aston Martin ‘link together’ towards future success
Cowell revealed more on the elements behind Newey’s day-to-day work schedule at Silverstone, having recently said in the Aston interview that its new facility is “the best” in F1.
I guess we’ve provided the infrastructure to work with Adrian, a drawing board and quickly getting that into the wind tunnel,” he said. “That’s different, but I guess principally what he’s providing is an assessment of how good each of the steps are that we’re using from idea to output from the wind tunnel and that’s both in terms of how strong each area is and that’s accuracy, but also time frame because this is an industry where you want every single learning loop to be as fast as possible.
“However, it needs to be precise so he’s providing us an assessment on both of those.”
Cowell also further articulated what Newey’s presence in the principality this weekend will bring to the team, saying that getting a good understanding of how the team works trackside will dovetail well with his observations back at base.
“I’m really keen that the engineering machine at Silverstone creates a great race car, we bring it to a circuit, we absolutely maximise the performance of the car and strategically pick up every single point and then we feedback what’s missing and we go again.
“As you say Adrian, seeing a big chunk of the factory world, you’ll see the first race of the circuit world and it just helps you link it all together.”
READ MORE – Adrian Newey to attend F1 Monaco GP with Aston Martin
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