Adrian Newey will have a significant presence among Aston Martin's senior leadership at the Monaco Grand Prix, which is the first Formula 1 race he is attending with his new team.
Newey started as Aston Martin’s managing technical partner in March, with a dual remit to help improve all technical and engineering aspects of the organisation while making the 2026 car architecture his priority in terms of direct development input.
Next year’s massive regulatory overhaul is a huge opportunity for Aston Martin but Newey has also been offering some assistance on its troubled 2025 car in the form of “lunchtime conversations” with the small team still working on aerodynamic development of the AMR-25.
That has all meant his focus so far has been on working at the team’s new Silverstone campus, learning about its CFD and windtunnel development processes, and understanding its development strengths and weaknesses.
Last week, Aston Martin aerodynamics director Eric Blandin called it a “massive plus” to have Newey focused on the 2026 car architecture with how he views car design holistically.
“When he designs something, he's thinking about not just the aero side, he's thinking about the vehicle dynamics, etc,” said Blandin.
“It does help us to make big, big step forwards.”
Now Newey is at a grand prix for the first time - starting with Thursday media day - so in Monaco, he will have the chance to observe the team’s trackside processes up close.
It is understood Newey will have a place on the pitwall, and a desk in engineering meetings, which means he will be directly plugged into the sessions and engage where appropriate, rather than just be an observer - which team principal Andy Cowell said is an important step.
“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,” said Cowell.
“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.”
Newey’s presence trackside is relevant partly because of how he prefers to work as he has always valued being on-site, observing not only his team’s process with his own eyes but also other team’s cars in person.
However, as his job relates to elevating Aston Martin’s technical work on a broader level - not just contributing his own design work - the way the car is engineered trackside is key to that.
Looking good in green, Adrian. 💚
— Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team (@AstonMartinF1) May 22, 2025
Adrian Newey arriving at the #MonacoGP for his first race weekend trackside with Aston Martin Aramco. pic.twitter.com/kppgJQ5vK4
Cowell said that Newey’s “experience, insight and creativity will help absolutely everybody in the team, and working at the track will give him a more complete view now".
This includes judging whether Aston Martin has improved its trackside-to-factory development loop, which was a big reason for the changes Cowell made to the technical structure over the winter.
“I'm really, 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,” said Cowell.
“Adrian’s seen a big chunk of the factory world. He’ll see his first race of the circuit world. And it just helps link it all together.”
On the impact Aston Martin has already felt from Newey at base, Cowell said the team had a different way of working to incorporate Newey’s preference for a drawing board - which Newey himself has admitted is not always the most efficient process as it then needs to be ‘translated’ given design work gets done in CAD before moving onto further development stages.
Cowell said that meant a tangible difference in terms of “infrastructure” but 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 windtunnel”.
“That's both in terms of how strong each area is and that's accuracy, but also timeframe,” said Cowell.
“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.”
