Newey: There Was No AMR26 Model Ready to Work With

Adrian Newey says he found almost no 2026 groundwork at Aston Martin, and that a two-week wind tunnel delay compounded a start already months behind rivals.

Adrian Newey has given the clearest explanation yet of why Aston Martin’s 2026 campaign collapsed before it began: when he arrived at Silverstone, there was almost nothing to build on.

The team has scored a single point in eleven rounds. Fernando Alonso holds it, from 10th in Miami. Lance Stroll has none. Aston Martin is last but one in the Constructors’ Championship, ahead only of debutant Cadillac.

Arriving to an Empty Drawing Board

Newey joined Aston Martin on 1 March 2025, by which point rival teams had been running 2026 concepts in the wind tunnel since the first of January.

“The reality is that there was no model really ready to start working with,” he said.

That sentence carries a lot of weight. The 2026 regulations represent the largest technical reset in more than a decade: new power unit architecture, active aerodynamics, a different weight and dimension envelope. Teams that started early were not gaining a marginal advantage; they were building the understanding everything else depends on.

Aston Martin started late and then, by Newey’s account, made a choice that cost it more time.

The Two-Week Decision

The team had access to the Mercedes wind tunnel at Brackley while its own facility at Silverstone was being completed. It chose to wait.

“We took the decision, rightly or wrongly, to delay it by about two weeks until our own tunnel was ready, rather than starting at Brackley for a very short period and then having to move again,” Newey explained.

Read narrowly, two weeks is trivial across a development programme spanning eighteen months. Read in context, it is two weeks added to a deficit that was already measured in months, and it came at the point in the cycle where early aerodynamic direction is set.

The phrase “rightly or wrongly” suggests he is not entirely settled on it himself.

What This Means for Alonso’s Decision

The timing of these comments is not incidental. Alonso is out of contract at the end of the season and has said he will decide his future after the summer break, which ended this week.

The Spaniard turned 45 in July. He has spent four seasons at Aston Martin on the promise that the 2026 regulation change, the new Silverstone campus, the Honda works partnership and Newey himself would combine into a car capable of winning. Instead he has one point.

Newey’s explanation is, in a sense, an argument for patience: the problem was a late start, not a broken organisation, and a late start is fixable. Whether that argument lands with a driver in his mid-forties who has been waiting since 2013 for a twelfth Grand Prix win is another matter.

Juan Pablo Montoya, speaking this week, was sceptical about the whole structure. “Stroll will leave if the car doesn’t improve. You only have to look at him, he’s clearly had enough of suffering for three years,” he said, adding that “if the car isn’t better next year, I even think Aston Martin will have two free seats in 2028 and Alonso will also say bye bye.”

The Honda Relationship Is the Other Half of the Story

Aston Martin’s 2026 difficulties have never been purely aerodynamic. The Honda works power unit arrived with problems of its own, and the relationship between Silverstone and Sakura was reported as strained through the early part of the season.

Both sides have since worked to correct that impression. Honda has said the relationship is getting better and better, and Newey has spoken about the bond growing stronger after the disastrous start.

Newey becomes team principal for 2027, taking on the organisational side as well as the technical one.

Year Two Is the Real Verdict

There is a version of this that ends well. Newey’s record is built on second and third iterations rather than first attempts, and a team that started a 2026 concept late is not permanently disadvantaged once everyone is working from the same baseline.

There is also a version where a single point in a season this significant does lasting damage, to sponsorship, to recruitment, and to the patience of a driver Aston Martin cannot easily replace.

Alonso’s answer, expected in the coming weeks, will be the first real indication of which one Aston Martin is living in.

Source: Motor.es

About the author

Leopold

Leopold Pleijsier founded F1-Fansite.com in 2001 and has followed Formula 1 since the early 1980s. He writes about daily F1 news, race weekends, drivers and the sport’s history.

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