Aston Martin boss Andy Cowell believes the team could be further up the field in Formula 1 this season if Adrian Newey were not solely focusing on its 2026 challenger.
The Silverstone-based squad has endured a difficult campaign this year, currently sitting sixth in the Constructors’ Championship with 62 points, 24 behind fifth-placed Williams.
A failure to capitalise on its whirlwind 2023 campaign, in which it finished with a points haul of 280, has been a source of frustration within the team’s ranks.
But it scored a huge coup with the arrival of Newey, which was announced last year, with the technical guru commencing his work as Managing Technical Partner from March.
The compromise has been that Newey has been left to switch into “2026 mode” and put his efforts into grappling with the radical technical regulations amid the design of next year’s car.
This has left Cowell naturally pondering what might have been if he had been able to utilise Newey’s expertise with its current AMR25 machine.
“I guess in terms of championship points that we’ve managed to accumulate, it’s been disappointing. It’s frustrating,” Cowell told Autosport.
“It’s one of those years where I stood at the back of the grid at the start of the race and I was thinking: ‘If the 2026 regulations weren’t here, where would we be now? What performance would we have added to this car if, since March, Adrian had been focused on 2025 car development?’
“There’s a dozen other people that have joined in leadership roles and tools that have improved.
“If all of that had been focused on ’25 car development, where would we be compared with now?
“Now, our opponents would have improved as well, but I feel like with the horsepower of Adrian and the other equipment that is better than it was six months ago, we would be further up the grid and collecting more points over the second half of the season.”
Cowell admitted, however, that the decision to deploy Newey to work on 2026 on his famed drawing board has been the most sensible one.
“That’s not an option, because it’s not just about investing in 2026,” he explained.
“It’s investing in performance for the start of 2026 that you then build on over many years, so therefore it is absolutely the right thing to invest in 2026 and beyond.
“That is painful when you are stood on the back of a grid and there’s only the medical car behind you, that’s not much fun…”
Aston Martin sees positives in new wind tunnel
Cowell’s medical car quip is a reference to its lowest ebb of 2025 – the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, where both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll were woefully off the pace.
The team has tweaked areas of the AMR25 across the season, including its floor and front wing, the latter enabling a significant upturn in form at the next race in Hungary, where Alonso and Stroll took fifth and seventh respectively.
Cowell explained that, at the very least, the fluctuating changes via its changeable parts are a vindication of the new wind tunnel at the ever-growing technology campus, a stone’s throw from the Silverstone circuit.
“What we were keen to do with the Imola update was make sure that the new wind tunnel could be used to do the [aero] map at the end of that development journey, but a good chunk of the aerodynamicists was focused on 2026 from the beginning of January,” he said.
“So, it was part of our aero team that did work using the Mercedes tunnel, and then in the last couple of weeks using our own tunnel.
“We were determined to make sure that the update was robust, that in every step of the journey, every viewpoint was that it would make the race car quicker.
“And it’s pleasing to see that on the Friday at Imola, that unanimous view was still in favour of the update.”
It was at this point that Aston initially decided to end its development of the AMR25, but as results picked up, it found itself right in the middle of the midfield battle.
And heading into this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the team is firmly in the mix along with Racing Bulls and Sauber.
“Our original intention was that that was all we would do and that’s the spec for the whole season,” Cowell revealed.
“On the way to Imola, you’re nervous that that’s not going to be enough to step you up, so we did do a little bit more development work with a tiny group of people who did some improvements to the floor that we ran in Silverstone, and the front wing that we ran in Spa.
“What we’ve been trying to do is do structured, thorough engineering work, where you have an idea and you work out what every step is along the way. We’re not going to cut corners, and we’re going to work out how to do that in a competitive lead time, but without dropping the quality.
“And I believe that will pay off for every season into the future.”
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