Adrian Newey explained the reshuffle at Aston Martin.
This week Aston Martin unexpectedly announced a reshuffle in its leadership — in 2026 Adrian Newey will replace Andy Cowell as the Formula 1 team principal. The British engineer flew to the Qatar round and, in a conversation with Sky Sports, explained what prompted that decision.
Adrian Newey: "To be honest, it became perfectly clear to us that, given the complexity of the task of integrating the 2026 power unit, Andy's skills would be fully useful in building the cooperation between Honda, Aramco and the team. So he has generously volunteered to take care of all that in the first half of 2026.
And then we asked ourselves, 'Okay, but who will be the team principal?' And since I was going to be at all the early races anyway, those duties wouldn't really affect my workload, so I decided to take on that part of the job as well."
Newey brushed off concerns that the new role would distract him from car development: "Designing the car is really what I want and should be doing. It's what gets me out of bed in the morning. Nothing will distract me from that."
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Adrian Newey explained the reshuffle at Aston Martin.
Aston Martin unexpectedly announced changes in leadership — in 2026 Adrian Newey will replace Andy Cowell as head of the Formula 1 team. The British engineer flew to the Qatar round and explained what prompted the decision.