3 hours Ago By Henry Valantine
Aston Martin team principal and CEO Andy Cowell has given insight into the positive impact Adrian Newey has already had on the team, soon after his arrival at Silverstone. Newey officially began his new role at Aston Martin on March 3rd after almost two decades at Red Bull, where his focus will be placed on the team’s 2026 challenger. Newey arrived at Aston Martin in the newly-created role of managing technical partner, overseeing the team’s 2026 car design alongside becoming a shareholder within the company.
Having set straight to work on the car that will see Aston Martin through Formula 1’s mass regulation changes, Cowell revealed there has already been an example of what he dubbed “the Adrian effect” in action, with his ideas coming to life from the drawing board. There are elements within his early input, too, that the team principal revealed has him “smiling to himself”, with Aston Martin’s engineers “embracing” Newey’s ideas. “Adrian’s been with us for 10 days now, and his first day was exactly as you say, very low key,” Cowell told reporters in Melbourne.
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“His experiences is vast. His hunger is huge, and it’s just wonderful conversations about making fast race cars and the compromises that you have to make, the trade-offs that you need to make, and building up good working relationships with the engineers that have been pushing the concept to date – and there are already a few areas I’m smiling to myself. “I won’t give you the detail because I don’t want our opponents to know, but you know, there’s a couple of areas where already he’s saying, ‘Can we just push that in this direction? Can we just do that?’ And engineers, mechanical engineers, composite engineers, are looking at it and going, ‘Yeah, okay, we’ll have a go.
’ “And I think that’s the Adrian effect. He picks up on the areas where you should push them and everybody’s just embracing it.” Read next: Wolff provides latest status update on Max Verstappen to Mercedes.
