Newey admits Aston ‘guilty’ of leaving F1 drivers out of the loop

Adrian Newey has delivered a candid admission that lays bare one of Aston Martin's biggest failings this season, conceding that the struggling Formula 1 team has not done enough to keep Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll involved in the development of a car that has left both drivers stranded at the back of the field.

It is a striking confession from the man leading Aston Martin's technical overhaul.

While the Silverstone-based outfit has already accepted that sacrificing short-term competitiveness was necessary to rebuild for the future, Newey now acknowledges another mistake: failing to ensure its drivers felt they were part of that process.

With Aston Martin enduring a miserable start to Formula 1's new regulations era – hampered by poor pace, reliability concerns and just a single point from the opening nine races – the lack of communication has only amplified frustration inside the garage.

'Guilty' of not spending enough time with Alonso and Stroll

Alonso has made little secret of his disappointment over the team's decision to shelve incremental upgrades while rivals continued to improve, and Newey accepts Aston Martin should have done a better job of bringing its drivers into the conversation.

Having described it as "extremely frustrating" for Alonso and Stroll "to not be able to race competitively with all the problems we've had, reliability and performance", Newey said he had made a point of sitting down with both race drivers to explain the team's roadmap.

He revealed he had been "going through with both Fernando and Lance exactly what we're doing, what we have planned with the upgrade package, what we have planned through going into the '27 season".

"Whilst it might not seem like it, we are very much listening to their comments and trying to act upon it," Newey insisted, quoted by The Race.

"If people don't feel as if they're being heard then they of course get very frustrated; it's human reactions.

"So perhaps we've been guilty of not spending enough time with Fernando and Lance, Jak [Crawford, reserve driver] here, kind of going through exactly what we are trying to achieve with the upgrade package."

The admission effectively validates the irritation that has simmered publicly from Alonso, whose patience has been tested by a campaign in which Aston Martin has watched the midfield disappear into the distance while waiting for a major upgrade package.

Pain now for hope later

According to Newey, that strategy was not born out of complacency but necessity.

Rather than chasing small gains with a fundamentally uncompetitive package, Aston Martin deliberately froze development during the first half of the season to focus its resources on a substantial aerodynamic and weight-saving overhaul scheduled to debut in Hungary before receiving a further evolution at Zandvoort.

Newey explained why the team chose a path that almost guaranteed its deficit would grow before it could shrink.

"Our learning curve was behind, but it became quite obvious very quickly that we were not going to be competitive in the early races,” he continued.

"So we took the painful, but I believe correct, decision to not do any development through the first half of the year, knowing that would actually mean, as everybody else develops of course, the gap to the front would actually get bigger.

"But with the view to then really getting ourselves better-organised, putting a lot of different systems into place for the future and then really doing our research properly because the '26 car was done in a very compressed timescale.

"So it's enabled us to step back a bit, take a bit of pressure off ourselves - because I think we actually put ourselves under too much pressure over the winter - and take a deep breath and really understand our problems: what we need to achieve both medium term - which will be with this upgrade package that we hope to have ready in Hungary as a first stage, a second stage in Zandvoort.

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"I've classed that [as medium term], now of course it's short term - at the time it was medium term and we made that decision - and then long term meaning decisions that will put us in a stronger place through this coming winter and into the '27 season. So that's what we've done.

"As I say, thank you everybody for their patience and understanding because it's very painful for us and for everybody, our partners, to see our current performance but hopefully this will soon be a distant...painful; painful still, but distant memory."

Whether that optimism survives contact with reality is another question entirely.

The Hungarian Grand Prix upgrade has become one of the most anticipated technical packages of the season – not because it is expected to vault Aston Martin to the front overnight, but because it must prove the team's gamble has not been in vain.

If the overhaul fails to deliver, Newey's admission that Aston Martin left its drivers feeling unheard may become just one symptom of a much deeper problem.

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