Do Newey’s previous F1 successes complete Aston Martin’s ambitious puzzle?

Add the record Formula 1 drivers’ title hauls of Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton together and you only just surpass the 13 such championships cars designed by Adrian Newey have amassed in his long list of grand prix racing successes. And then there are those 12 constructors’ crowns on top. This alone explains the clamour surrounding his Red Bull exit and impending arrival at Aston Martin, announced today.

Adding another title for a fourth F1 squad – Newey’s sixth overall after he started out as a designer for the Fittipaldi team, following his aeronautics and astronautics studies at Southampton University – would cap his storied career.

Newey will join Aston with the job title of Managing Technical Partner. Enrico Cardile has been hired by the Silverstone-based team with the chief technical officer moniker Newey is leaving at Red Bull, while his former aerodynamics associate at Red Bull, Dan Fallows, is already Aston technical director.

But it’s that title with which Newey is synonymous. After his stint designing Indycars following his post-Fittipaldi work as a March F1 designer, all of which included experience working as a race engineer that would come to pay him back in harmonising later effort on F1 car production, Newey’s first technical director role came at the fledgling Leyton House/March squad in 1990.

Midway through that year, he joined Williams as chief designer (Patrick Head being technical director already) having been forced to either leave his previous team or accept a lesser role. By 1997, he was technical director at McLaren, before joining Red Bull in the same position in 2006.

All of his F1 titles were accrued with these three squads, with Red Bull’s coming in two distinct periods of the early 2010s and 2020s. At Leyton House, the design staff headcount came in at five engineers, while Williams was 20-25.

While not a small team, Newey will have to adapt to working with fewer staff than at Red Bull

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Through Newey’s long career, in what he calls a “sea change” development, computing power advances and increasing budgets meant F1 team sizes ballooned. At Aston, he will work within an overall team of over 700, which is small compared to the 1,000+ staff at, say, Mercedes.

Not that the computing advances have completely altered Newey’s own processes – his RB17 hypercar began with sketches he drew during 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown Christmas.

At Aston, Newey will get the chance to right something of a rare wrong in his career – his regret at not having previously worked with Fernando Alonso. He had the chance to do likewise with Hamilton at Ferrari from 2025, having left McLaren when his fellow Briton was still a junior driver there.

The timing of his actual arrival is key – as his March 2025 start date means he still has time to provide input into the team’s 2026 car design. This means there is the potential to add another notch to his impressive list of nailing F1 rules resets.

Newey simply “very much enjoys the challenge of” a new F1 car rules era

He’d eventually brought Williams back to double title successes in 1996 and 1997 after fully understanding the 1995 wing and floor rule changes, then his 1998 McLaren design was the class leader of F1’s switch to narrower cars.

From 2009, Red Bull utterly dominated the early years of the championship’s upper-aero-stripped cars (bar the double diffuser aberration of 2009 itself) and then from mid-2022 to mid-2024, the team’s designs were even more crushingly good in the new ground-effect era.

Specifically, on the 2022 RB18 that spawned another illustrious car linage, Newey drew its pull-rod front, push-rod rear suspension arrangement, as well the surrounding bodywork of these parts. But he simply “very much enjoys the challenge of” a new F1 car rules era.

By 2022, Newey was working as Red Bull chief technical officer and, in addition to the specifics of producing certain car zones, his influence was felt in other critical areas.

Newey’s ground effect insight was crucial to Red Bull’s instant success in the new aerodynamic era for F1

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

This included simply challenging certain design decisions and he is also credited with helping Red Bull avoid the pitfalls many of its rivals found at the start of the current rules era – such as not being seduced by the theoretical peak downforce levels other design approaches might offer, thanks to his early career ground-effect design experience. Given he’s joining a team already stuffed with senior technical staff, that will likely be very helpful for Aston too.

It can’t be said for sure right now, but, given the timing of Newey’s Red Bull exit being announced at 2024’s Miami GP and the team’s subsequent tumble this season, it seems his soon-to-be-former squad has missed this. At McLaren, his other former squad, it is said that the team is benefitting from exactly this sort of guidance from new chief designer Rob Marshall – another recent Red Bull leaver.

Still, Aston is an interesting landing spot for Newey.

He’s joining a team that is obsessed with appearances, simply because its owner made his fortune doing exactly that. This is a potential pitfall given Newey came to detest the restrictions such an approach had at McLaren’s shiny Technology Centre 20 years ago.

Aston is currently finishing building its new Silverstone factory, where owner Lawrence Stroll reportedly spent £135,000 on trees to block what he deemed the unsightly view from his new office, then he didn’t like the trees and had those replaced too.

But Newey is also a headstrong character – just a quiet-natured one. Correctly functioning hierarchy is critical to how he operates – he left McLaren hating its old matrix management system that meant a ‘flat’ structure with multiple reporting lines. He came to feel it produced a ‘design by committee’ approach, while it was made clear to the F1 press corps whenever he was annoyed if he wasn’t being given the correct credit for Red Bull’s recent car successes.

Will the new rules keep Newey engaged enough to be effective with Aston Martin?

Photo by: FIA

Ultimately – and this will be key for Aston discovering if its rumoured £30m-a-year investment does translate into that next glittering chapter for Newey – he must be engaged by an F1 rules challenge to hit his best levels.

That’s how differently his work is delivered compared to the start of his career at much smaller teams. Although it’s obvious that in accepting a new challenge – having been unimpressed by the Christian Horner behaviour scandal at 2024’s commencement (which speaks to Newey’s principles) when he could’ve walked away from F1 – he’s up for a long-term challenge.

But given what happened during the last time engine performance came to be the key differentiator for F1 cars – at the start of the turbo hybrid era from 2014 – it wouldn’t be unexpected for Newey to get fed up again if this reoccurs in 2026. He’s already known to be frustrated that the active aero rules for those cars are being created to make up for apparent early deficiencies in the way the new engines deliver their power.

Newey has the pedigree Aston desires. In broad terms, he should be the missing piece of its project to reach the F1 dominator position so many of his other teams have already enjoyed. But if that doesn’t happen, lots of stories will surely be changed forever, particularly Aston Martin’s.