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‘We’ve got to lift up to that level’
Andy Cowell reacts to Adrian Newey’s comments that some of Aston Martin’s tools are currently “weak”.
Andy Cowell has given his take on Adrian Newey’s comments that some of Aston Martin’s tools are currently “weak”, with the Team Principal suggesting that the squad need to “lift up” to the level that Newey is setting.
Newey made his first appearance at a race since joining Aston Martin during last weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix, the Briton having started in his role as Managing Technical Partner in March following his departure from Red Bull.
Speaking exclusively to F1.com’s Lawrence Barretto in Monte Carlo, Newey reflected on what he has been working on so far and acknowledged the progress that the team still need to make, with the Briton stating that some equipment at Aston Martin’s Silverstone headquarters requires further improvement.
"It's fair to say that some of our tools are weak. Particularly the driver-in-the-loop simulator needs a lot of work because it's not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool."
ADRIAN NEWEY
On the situation at Aston Martin
The roots of the Aston Martin team trace back to the little independent operation called Jordan, founded by Eddie Jordan. They've always operated efficiently with a small budget. It's one thing to do that, though, and another to be able to make the most of significantly more resources.
As a result, they are suffering growing pains – and thus Newey accepts it would be unwise to stress the system too quickly and it will take time to gel the project.
"I think Aston has gone from a small team as Jordan, and then the pink team at Force India, and then into Racing Point and so forth, where it's always a small but over-performing team," he says.
"It's grown hugely in a very short space of time into what it is now. And we now really need to settle down and kind of get the organisational structure perhaps a little bit better sorted out, work out how we all work together as effectively as possible and develop the simulation tools, because that's one of the areas which I would say we're quite weak in."
Following on from this, Cowell was asked during a chat with Sky Sports F1 in Monaco about the remarks and whether such teething problems were inevitable after the significant investment put into the team’s state-of-the-art factory.
“I think whenever you create new equipment, it takes a while to commission it and then work out how well correlated either the DLS [Dynamic Lap Simulation] or the wind tunnel is with the real world here," said Cowell.
“So you need to do some updates, bring it to the track, you need to see how everything matches up – that’s the correlation – and even experienced teams have problems with correlation, you hear it up and down the pit lane.”
Cowell – who joined Aston Martin as CEO in October 2024 before also taking on the role of Team Principal ahead of the 2025 season – went on to praise Newey for helping the team to focus on areas to improve going forward.
“The great thing with Adrian is he’s coming in and saying what’s great,” Cowell explained. “He’s setting the level that is really good, and so we’ve got to lift up to that and it’s work that we were already working on, but Adrian just helps refine the jobs list.”
