Revealed: What an Adrian Newey day at Aston Martin looks like

Adrian Newey offered a fascinating, detailed insight into the inner workings of the Aston Martin Formula 1 team, and how he goes about a day at the factory.

Newey, a legendary F1 car designer who has contributed to 26 world championship wins, arrived at Aston Martin in March and has been laser focused on the new regulations coming for F1 2026. As managing technical partner and team shareholder, Newey is looking to transform Aston Martin from an ambitious midfield team, into title combatants.

Adrian Newey discusses Aston Martin day and leadership goals

Major changes are coming for F1 2026. The cars are due to become smaller and 30 kilograms lighter, and will utilise active aerodynamics. New engines are also on the way. These revamped power units will see the electrical power output tripled, while the internal combustion engine will run on fully sustainable biofuel.

Such sweeping changes represent opportunity, so with Newey and Honda on board as their new engine supplier, Aston Martin will strive to make a flying start to the new F1 era.

Newey has been working on the F1 2026 car since his Aston Martin arrival, and in an appearance on the James Allen on F1 podcast, Newey was asked how he manages his extensive Aston Martin engineering team, and his own time at their Silverstone factory.

“The answer really is to break it down into small areas,” he said.

“So 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.

“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.

“In our case, we have a once a week meeting where one of the groups will present to the other three. 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.

“So you kind of, I suppose, simplistically, and I guess it’s classic management in this way, you’ve got the umbrella pyramid of breaking it down and subdividing, but then it’s making sure that those subdivisions communicate between each other. Hopefully in a flat way, they don’t have to go back up the chain to communicate somewhere else.

“It’s really about encouraging breaking down those silos and trying to encourage people to talk to each other and not just tap.

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“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.”

Of “the remaining 90 per cent”, Newey suggested that he likes to split that evenly between “just walking 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.”

Aston Martin – currently P7 in the F1 2025 Constructors’ Championship – will continue with the same driver line-up of Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll for F1 2026.

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