Adrian Newey Explains How Aston Martin Fell Months Behind Before Their Big Hungary Upgrade Gamble

• Adrian Newey says Aston Martin’s difficult 2026 season traces back to starting the AMR26 project several months behind their rivals
• The team has held back all season for one large upgrade at the Hungarian Grand Prix rather than adding parts gradually
• A new Honda power unit will not arrive until the Dutch Grand Prix, after Formula 1’s summer break

Adrian Newey has given his clearest account yet of how Aston Martin’s promising winter turned into one of the toughest seasons of his career, as the team finally rolls out its first major upgrade of 2026 at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

The AMR26 arrived at the Barcelona shakedown in January to genuine excitement, with Mercedes driver George Russell calling it “pretty spectacular” and among the most distinctive designs on the grid. That excitement did not survive contact with a stopwatch. Aston Martin qualified at the back of the field behind only newcomers Cadillac in Australia, and vibration problems limited how many laps Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll could complete on race day.

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Newey Explains Where It Went Wrong

Speaking in an interview for Aston Martin’s official website, Newey did not soften his assessment of the campaign. “Extremely challenging,” he said, summing up the season so far. “On both the chassis side and the power unit side, we’ve been on the back foot from the start.”

He pointed to how late the project began relative to the rest of the grid. “In hindsight, we probably put too much expectation on ourselves, and of course, you must never forget the quality of the opposition you’re up against across the grid,” Newey said. “We didn’t start serious work on the ’26 car until mid-March 2025 and didn’t get a model into the wind tunnel until mid-April. That left us several months behind our rivals, and that’s a huge gap to close.”

Newey also pointed to deeper structural issues within the team, describing tools and workflows that had been patched together for years, some tracing back to the days of the original Jordan operation founded in the early 1990s. “We’ve taken this difficult spell as an opportunity to overhaul how we work,” he said.

One Big Package Instead of a Steady Trickle

Rather than introducing incremental updates across the season, Aston Martin chose to hold everything back for a single, sweeping package built specifically for Hungary, with Honda following separately at the Dutch Grand Prix after the summer break.

Newey admitted that decision came at a cost through the first ten rounds of the year. “It was a painful decision,” he said. “While others have been adding performance, we’ve effectively been standing still in relative terms, so each weekend can feel more painful than the last. But we believe it’s the right decision, the right investment for our future, if you like.”

He cast the wait as a deliberate trade-off for a stronger finish to the year and beyond. “Our partners understand that this is a necessary trying period that we, in truth, probably need to go through to come out stronger, with a decent step forward in the second half of this season and a much bigger one for next year,” Newey said.

Last time out at Spa-Francorchamps, a circuit that punishes chassis and engine weaknesses more than most, Alonso and Stroll were cut adrift from the pack by around two seconds and more than four seconds off the pace needed to escape Q1.

What Is Actually Changing on the Car

Newey outlined the scope of the changes arriving in Budapest, stressing that the core architecture of the AMR26 remains untouched even as the car sheds mass and its aerodynamic surfaces change substantially. “The main structural elements remain the same, the chassis and gearbox architecture don’t fundamentally change, but we’ve taken weight out of both, which required re-homologating and crash testing the forward chassis,” he said.

“The front suspension is unchanged. The rear suspension is slightly revised. We’ve developed a new nose and substantially revised aerodynamic surfaces,” Newey continued. “So, while the core structure is similar, it’s a big aerodynamic package coupled with significant weight reduction. The target is to get very close to the weight limit.”

He stopped short of promising specific gains before the car has turned a wheel with the new parts fitted. “We’re predicting a large step, but I’m reluctant to put specific numbers out there,” Newey said. “We’ll have to see when the car gets on track.”

Krack Just Wants to Go Racing Again

Chief Trackside Officer Mike Krack set a simpler benchmark for success than raw lap time, given how far off the pace Alonso and Stroll have been running. “For us, the most important is that we go back racing, because we have not over the last events, it was very difficult to keep up with the midfield,” Krack said. “Whatever it’s going to bring, I think going racing is most important for everyone.”

He described the long wait for parts as finally over. “I think the period that we had with no upgrades for very long is now over, so it looks good for the future, and we are just all looking forward to Budapest and seeing what we have,” Krack said. “As Adrian was saying, the main things are obviously aerodynamic changes and weight reduction. To achieve that you have to do a lot of things, and everything has been achieved that we wanted. We’re counting the days.”

Krack also addressed the working relationship with Honda, which supplies the AMR26’s underperforming power unit and will introduce its own upgrade at Zandvoort. Honda’s Trackside General Manager and Chief Engineer, Shintaro Orihara, described the early months of the partnership as difficult but constructive. “We had a tough moment in winter testing, but I’d say we built up our relationship through the tough moment, and we built up the fundamentals to work together,” Orihara said. “Every tough moment, we can learn from that.”

Krack echoed that sentiment in blunter terms. “It’s easy to point the finger, but we sat together and we said, ‘We are in this together. We need to work hard to get out of it together,'” he said. “We knew that there would be a lot of difficult moments. We had more than one meeting where we discussed this, and I think it improved the relationship big time, in the garage, in the engineering office, and also in the whole technical collaboration between Silverstone and Sakura.”

The Reserve Driver Feeling the Car’s Every Flaw

Reserve driver Jak Crawford, a 21-year-old American who finished runner-up in Formula 2 last season, has taken on a significant role in the AMR26’s development, combining real practice outings in Japan, Austria and Belgium with hours spent in the simulator sampling the new package before it reaches the track.

Crawford did not disguise how tough the car has been to drive in its current form. “I think this will be the last ‘not good’ race we’ll have, I think it will be one of the worst,” he said of Spa. “The circuit is very tough on the power unit and everything, so we expected to struggle a lot here, plus having this car that’s now quite old.”

He said the mood around the upgrade remained upbeat regardless of the results. “But looking forward, for sure, everyone is excited for the new car. We’re not expecting to blow everyone away, but I think it’s a step in the right direction of what’s to come for the next couple of years,” Crawford said.

He explained how closely his simulator work is tied to the real car once it hits the track. “Of course, we’ve been preparing for these new upgrades, we have a model in the sim, even though we haven’t driven on the track. It’s just an estimation that we try. When you have it for real, you have a better idea of where your car stands and you’re able to correlate that into the simulator,” Crawford said. “I’m taking a lot of good information from Fernando, from Lance, from the engineers. I’m super fortunate to be able to work with all these engineers that trust me like one of the race drivers, I think, which is great. When I run in the sim, they trust what I say and trust what I’m doing. My feedback goes to everyone in the factory. They’re all trying to make the cars as good as possible, as driveable as possible, for the next race, and everyone, I’m sure, has been listening to every comment very closely.”

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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