‘Question marks’ raised amid Adrian Newey’s Aston Martin F1 car hype

Sky Sports F1’s Ted Kravitz and Martin Brundle have shared their first impressions of the Adrian Newey-designed Aston Martin.

Aston Martin’s much-anticipated 2026 challenger finally emerged from the garage as Lance Stroll debuted the AMR26 on the penultimate day of the private Barcelona shakedown.

Stroll completed only a handful of laps before stopping on track to bring out the only red flag of the day on Thursday, but the first glimpse of Newey’s Honda-powered Aston Martin set tongues wagging.

Two-time world champion Fernando Alonso is getting his first taste of a Newey-designed F1 car on Friday. 

“The nosecone looks wider and fatter than the Mercedes and the McLaren and the Red Bull,” Sky Sports F1 pitlane reporter Kravitz said.

“We saw on that previous shot that the sidepod looks a bit bigger than the Red Bull. It’s got a bit of rake in it, which is a Newey trademark.”

‘Question marks’ amid Newey’s brilliance

Former F1 driver turned pundit Brundle backed Newey’s genius at interpreting regulations but raised “question marks” about the wider challenge facing Aston Martin in 2026.

There is great intrigue around Aston Martin for F1’s rules shake-up given Newey’s involvement and the fact the Silverstone-based squad have secured a works status through their exclusive engine deal with Honda.

“Adrian, his cars tend to be quite homogeneous in their beautiful, sweeping airflow to them, you often see that,” Brundle commented. “There doesn’t appear to be as many bits hanging off his cars as you do see some others.

|”It’s a really hard undercut on the sidepod and we’ve seen different interpretations on sidepods, front wings across the board, unsurprisingly, with such new regulations.

“We’ve got to assume Adrian has come up with some good ideas, but does he know enough about the Aston Martin wind tunnel and the digital wind tunnel and will he get correlation? Has he got the right people around him to interpret his brilliance?

“That’s a tall order straight out of the box, actually. Adrian was saying to me that Honda are having to play catch up because they were leaving and then they cam back in. So there’s some question marks there.

“We’ll have to wait and see but you just know Adrian will have a vision of how to maximise these regulations. Let’s hope he’s done it and let’s hope that car just flies.

“He’s also legendary for not wanting to sign things off, so when the car was late, it didn’t surprise me at all to be honest, because Adrian will push that, and he always has done, to the absolute limit because he wants the maximum time of development on those pieces and understanding.

“He doesn’t have that control function of a Christian Horner, or a Patrick Head, or whatever these days. He’s in charge of all of that, but if it absolutely takes off, then as ever, you can say he got it absolutely right. He’s waited until the last minute before having to commit.

“We’ll see - we don’t know - but I’m going to assume that car will be pretty handy through the year.”