Adrian Newey has revealed how a day in his life looks at Aston Martin as the Silverstone-based team prepares for Formula 1‘s 2026 regulation changes.
After almost two decades leading Red Bull to championship glory, Newey decided to call it quits on his time with the Milton Keynes-based outfit last year.
No sooner had he decided to pursue his next challenge in F1, Lawrence Stroll presented him with a unique opportunity – a stake within the British marque.
Starting in March, Newey assumed his role as the team’s Managing Technical Partner – overseeing Aston Martin’s preparations for the 2026 rules overhaul.
With a works Honda power unit deal also locked in for next season onwards, Newey’s job is to not only integrate himself within the team but also give himself the best chance of producing a title-contending design for the AMR26.
Speaking to James Allen on his F1 podcast, Newey broke down how he is fitting within the technical apparatus at Aston Martin.
“If you take aerodynamics as an example, we have around 80 aerodynamicists. They are then divided into four group areas: future car project, front of car, middle of car, rear of car,” he revealed.
“So you’ve now got, for the sake of argument, 20 in each group. You then have a project leader for each of those groups – it’s actually a bit less than that, it’s probably more like 15 in each group, because you have got other activities – so the project leader for those 15, that’s probably just about on the limits of how many people you can have reporting directly to you.
“So then hope that the communication within that group of 15 is good, and that’s part of the responsibilities of the project leader. Then you make sure that the group leaders are communicating well with each other.”
Newey’s aversion to Aston Martin team meetings
With Newey overseeing essentially every aspect of the chassis side of things at Aston Martin, the 66-year-old explained how the team most often demands his time in the meeting room.
“In our case, we have a once-a-week meeting where one of the groups will present to the other three,” he added.
“But those meetings, I would say, they have their use, but for me, if a meeting is only information sharing and nothing comes out of the meeting that causes you to do something different, in my view, it has been a waste of time. It has to be about creating ideas and new directions.”
Trying to pave a new culture at the team, Newey instead revealed how he tackles his time at the brand new state-of-the-art factory at Silverstone.
“Quite often, it’s the coffee break… or certainly in my own case, I spend roughly – when I’m in the factory, as opposed to races or whatever – I probably spend about 10 per cent of my time in meetings. I try to keep that absolutely minimum,” he said.
Other times, he revealed he just walks “around and talking to the engineers, literally standing at their CAD station, going through what they’re up to, talking to them about it, bouncing ideas, observations, and then the other 50 of the 90, I literally just spend in my office looking at inputs, be it a suspension geometry programme or a CFD, and then taking that and drawing what I believe will be solutions to then go out back out into the group for research.”
READ MORE – F1 assessing potential drastic rule change – report
Discussion about this post