Billionaires are demanding, impatient creatures. In Aston Martin’s previous incarnations, continuity of personnel was a hallmark even as owners came and went; under Lawrence Stroll’s ownership… well, it was probably a mistake not to install a revolving door in the team’s lavish new technical ‘campus’.
Since rebranding into British Racing Green, the cars have continued to toil and heads have rolled. Last July, Aston Martin announced it was hiring Enrico Cardile from Ferrari to become chief technical officer, and there have been at least two restructures of the engineering department while he has been on gardening leave.
Indeed, Ferrari is still fighting to delay his start date; Cardile’s employment status is becoming F1’s equivalent of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, the never-ending probate case which provides the background for Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House.
Among the developments while Cardile attends to his gladioli has been the hiring of Adrian Newey to a new position somewhere north of chief technical officer in the food chain. When Newey clocked in for work at the campus last month, he made it clear that learning the team and focusing on the upcoming 2026 ruleset would be his priorities: in previous career changes, when moving to McLaren and then Red Bull, he did his utmost not to get involved in debugging their existing cars.
But, given Aston Martin’s downbeat start to the 2025 season, that may not be an option.
Both cars were eliminated in Q2 in Australia, though Lance Stroll’s sixth-place finish ameliorated some of the angst arising from Fernando Alonso crashing out. The Chinese Grand Prix panned out similarly after a point-less sprint race, with Stroll a distant ninth and Alonso an early retirement with brake failure from the midfield.
In Japan, Stroll qualified and finished last and was the only driver to be classified a lap down, unable to make a strategy of starting on soft-compound tyres work. Alonso was also eliminated in Q3 as the car pivoted, like the almost 180-degree change in wind direction from Friday into Saturday, from being reasonably quick to behaving like a bucking bronco.
“We're not really fast enough to be in the top 10,” Alonso told Spanish media after finishing 11th. “I guess we're not even fast enough to be in the top 18.
“So to be 11th is a bit of a miracle. Because, as I say, the car felt pretty consistent all race. It didn't have much grip. We also have the slowest car on the straights.”
While some of Alonso’s other remarks, such as holding this result up as one of his greatest races (a claim we’ve surely heard before), were redolent with hyperbole, in this he was not very wrong. While Gabriel Bortoleto’s Sauber was slowest through the speed trap in qualifying and Jack Doohan’s Alpine tardiest in the race, neither Aston Martin driver was much faster – and they were over 8km/h slower in the race than George Russell’s Mercedes, the quickest car through the trap.
The opening rounds presented a similar but less extreme picture.
It all suggests the AMR25 lacks aerodynamic efficiency and the team is having to trade off straightline speed to try to find some cornering performance. This on top of being extremely sensitive to changes of wind direction, which was one factor blamed for Alonso’s adventure into the Degner gravel trap on Friday.
Motorsport.com understands that the Mondays after disappointing race weekends are uncomfortable ones at the Aston Martin factory as the owner breathes fire over his hapless employees. It is therefore inevitable that at some point Newey will be steered in the direction of the ailing 2025 project.
What form this input will take is unclear. F1 engineering doesn’t quite follow the rules of the African savannah, where a young lion’s first job upon taking the lead of a pride is to kill all his predecessor’s offspring.
Newey told this author in a 2007 interview that, when he joined Red Bull the previous year, he “took some time to understand the existing car” before putting all his energies into starting the next one from a clean sheet of paper. In his autobiography he was even less polite about what he found, why he took his most recent McLaren concept as a starting point instead, and why there was so little runway for change in Red Bull’s 2006 car.
“The car I drew was a better basis than the current 2006 Red Bull car,” he wrote, “which overheated, had poor downforce, handled poorly and had an unreliable gearbox. Apart from that it was OK!”
When a legal dispute over his gardening leave (some things never change) from Williams was resolved in mid-1997, upon moving into the McLaren factory Newey was immediately compelled to attend the Hungarian Grand Prix to help improve the existing car when all he wanted to do was focus on the new one. He suggested running softer springs and began plotting his retreat to the drawing board.
Here lies Aston’s problem. Adrian Newey is essentially a creative, a visionary – pulling him into developing an existing concept is a waste of his abilities, especially if that concept is fundamentally flawed.
“I always try to draw with passion,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In other words, I have to believe that what I’m drawing will be the next step forward. I find that if I don’t believe in what I’m drawing, it has never worked.
“The difficulty is always trying to be honest with yourself, knowing when to stop flogging the proverbial dead horse and move on to something different. Often I see colleagues being much too protective of avenues when it is increasingly obvious that they won’t yield results.”
Perhaps it will be to Aston Martin’s long-term advantage if the dead-horse AMR25 is sent to the glue factory, and Newey’s prodigious creativity and mental bandwidth is devoted to making next season’s new formula a success. But that would require a patience which is in short supply at the head of the organisation…
