Aston Martin boss Adrian Newey has revealed that his team has been on the “back foot” for four months.
Formula 1’s biggest ever regulation changes could see the order reshuffled, with Aston Martin set to take a major leap under the influence of design genius Newey, who helped create 15 championship-winning cars.
Formula 1 teams are allowed to run their 2026 machines from January 2025 and longer on the engine side, but Aston Martin was already playing catch-up and was late to last week’s Shakedown in Barcelona.
“The AMR technology campus is still developing, the CoreWeave Wind Tunnel wasn’t on track until April, and I only joined the team last March, so we’ve really started from behind. It’s been a very compressed timeline and an extremely busy 10 months,” Newey said at Aston Martin website.
“The reality is that we didn’t get a model of the ’26 car in the wind tunnel until mid-April, while most, if not all, of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel by the time the 2026 air test ban ended in early January last year.”
“That put us on the back burner by about four months, which meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle. The car only came together at the last minute, which left us struggling to make it to Barcelona Shakedown.”
2026 Aston Martin F1 car (Credit: Aston Martin)
Aston Martin completed just 65 laps at Barcelona – the fewest of the 10 teams running there, with Williams missing the entire event.
But when Aston Martin released its car on the penultimate day in black, it attracted a lot of attention as the car’s design stood out from the rest of the grid, with aggressive bodywork to redirect the airflow.
Nevei said, “I never look at any of my designs as aggressive. I just get on with things and go for what we feel is the right direction.”
“The direction we took could certainly be interpreted as aggressive. There are a lot of features that haven’t necessarily been done before. Does that make it aggressive? Maybe. Maybe not.”
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Sky Sports’ Martin Brundle gives his prediction on how Aston Martin will fare during the new F1 season
Newey: Aston Martin hopes car has ‘lots of development potential’
The big development race always takes place during the first season with new regulations as teams understand the nuances of their cars and add significant upgrades to achieve performance.
It is an area where Red Bull has generally excelled during Newey’s 18-year tenure, with Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen winning four consecutive drivers’ titles.
Newey says the AMR26 is “tightly packed, more so than Aston Martin’s previous six F1 cars since they joined F1 2020.
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Sky Sports F1’s Bernie Collins and Craig Slater share their thoughts on why Aston Martin arrived late at the track for F1 pre-season testing in Barcelona
“We’ve tried to build something that we hope will have a lot of development potential,” he said.
“What you want to avoid is a car that comes out fairly optimized within its window but lacks a lot of development potential.”
“We tried to do the opposite, which is why we really focused on the basics, put effort into it, knowing that some of the extras – the wings, the bodywork, the things that can be changed in season – will hopefully have development potential.
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Adrian Nevey explains why he replaced Andy Cowell as Aston Martin team principal for 2026.
When is F1 Bahrain pre-season testing?
The introduction of the new regulations means there is a tight schedule of three separate tests before the start of the 2026 season.
With the indoor Barcelona Shakedown now over, F1 will next head to Bahrain for two ‘official’ pre-season tests, when the media will be present and live track time will be available.
Two three-day tests in Bahrain take place on February 11-13 and 18-20.
When is the first F1 race?
The teams then have two weeks to prepare for the first round of the season, which is the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on March 6-8.
The first practice session of the season will take place on Friday 6th March, qualifying on Saturday 7th March and the opening race on Sunday 8th March.
Watch every race of the 2026 F1 season live on Sky Sports, starting with the Australian Grand Prix on March 6-8. Stream Ski Sports from NOW – no contract, cancel anytime