Outside Line: Coup of the Century! Stroll gets Newey for Aston Martin

65-year-old Canadian billionaire (Forbes values him at $3.9 billion) Stroll confirmed the worst kept secret in F1 (in recent weeks), which is a game changer for the sport and Aston Martin beyond Formula 1.

Stroll kick-started a new chapter for not only Aston Martin but also the world of F1 with these words on Monday: "Adrian Newey will be joining us as, first and foremost, a shareholder and our technical managing partner of our Formula 1 Team."

Seven-time F1 World Champion Lewis Hamilton to Ferrari was huge news, but it has to be eclipsed by news that Newey, whose cars have won 25 F1 world titles, will not go to Maranello and unite with Hamilton. Instead, he becomes a shareholder at Aston Martin and the team's F1 technical leader.

History shows that if Williams and perhaps even McLaren had offered Newey shares. He might have stayed with them. He might have been with them until now. But that didn't happen. His journey took a turn to Red Bull, and within five years, his design started winning World Championships, four in a row.

Newey cars have won the past three in a row, making Max Verstappen the F1 world champion three times over. Really no need to expand on his incredible value and accomplishments; we've written about those many times on these web pages of ours.

Apart from being a major asset to Lawrence Stroll's vision, a project that began as a vanity project to get his son Lance Stroll into Formula 1. He did that. The kid didn't deliver. But that did not stop Dad, who, in the meantime, turned the Aston Martin into an alternative to Ferrari, or the British version of Ferrari, motorsport legacy included.

How is it the coup of the century? Newey is going nowhere after this. He's got shares in a proper auto manufacturer with a legacy and a history, which he plugs into at a time of its renaissance in charge of its flagship, namely the F1 team.

At Aston Martin Newey, you will have the best of facilities, no expenses spared, and a state-of-the-art environment to develop F1 cars. He will never get bored because there's Le Mans, there's Hypercars, there's GT3s, there's sports cars, and there's road cars. Newey's 'playpen' just got so much bigger.

Be sure that the F1 project is his top priority for the foreseeable future. But as the years go on, he will not be looking elsewhere. He's on the board, so he has a decade (at least) in which to influence the F1 team to get it up and running and winning.

In between or thereafter, he can choose to help them win Le Mans or to create more efficient cars, whatever he fancies. It has to beat designing F1 cars for a team whose goal is to sell Red Bull cans.

I'm pretty sure Lance Stroll will keep his place. Fernando Alonso will hang on for a couple of years, finally getting to drive a Newey creation, which he has not done in the two decades of his career in F1 but did come close.

Alonso drove the McLaren MP4-22 in 2007, in his first spell at the Woking team, which was the successor to the MP4-21, which was the last McLaren Newey had a hand in officially. He joined Red Bull in 2006.

If Stroll Senior is really intent on getting his team to the top, they'll have to look at Lance and set some performance ultimatums for the owner's son, because he is being trounced by a veteran like Alonso at a very different period of his career.

When the Spanish 43-year-old has a good car, he'll drive it as hard as you can. If the car is substandard, why should he bother? He's a two-time F1 world champion; after all, he's been doing this for 20 years.

Whereas Stroll's primary ambition all the time is to beat Fernando. But with a good car, as was early last year, Fernando can find his way to the podium while Lance can't. A team needs two good drivers, and as we stand now, little Stroll is not one of those. But this isn't a story about the drivers.

For at least a decade, Newey will be designing F1 cars. Cars for the next generation of Champions, but until then, Newey is tasked to pen the Aston Martin F1 car for the 2026 season, a season of new rules, which is just what the design ace relishes.

He tends to be the first out of the blocks interpreting the next generation of F1 rules, as we have seen over the decades, including his total mastery of the current aero regulations, introduced in 2022 where Red Bull were well ahead of everybody else, and that was not the first time.

Thus, it would not be foolish to predict that in 2026 Aston Martin will be winning races that's only two years away, which makes Newey's acquisition an even bigger bargain for Lawrence. He has brought on board a 'design genius brand' that will be music to the ears of their marketing people.

This is a game changer for F1, although the impact is still to come. I reckon there will be a transformation of the pecking order from the moment the cars run in 2026, and even in 2025 when Newey really starts to get stuck into his new job.

One has to thus salute and respect Lawrence Stroll for putting his money where his mouth is, as well as all those who made it happen. Handing out shares was as shrewd as it gets. Ferrari would never go there one imagines. Today we witnessed F1 history made: Newey to Aston Martin!