Can Adrian Newey save Aston Martin and Honda from the deep Formula 1 rabbit hole they have slid into?

That is the uncomfortable reality facing Aston Martin after a bruising opening phase shaped by vibration problems, power unit drama, poor performance and growing internal strain. Newey remains the man entrusted to lead the recovery, but as Damon Hill made clear on The Undercut Podcast with Mark Hughes, genius and chaos have often lived side by side in the career of Formula 1’s greatest designer.

Hill knows better than most how Newey works. He won the 1996 Formula 1 title in a Williams shaped by Newey’s thinking and has seen first hand how the Briton chases performance right to the edge. That instinct, he suggested, is both Newey’s gift and his danger.

“It works more often than it doesn’t work,” Hughes said of Newey’s method, before Hill explained why the designer has always been wired to push beyond accepted limits: “I think he gets a kick out of if you said to Adrian, we’d be safe if we stayed within that circle. What happens when you go outside the circle?”

That philosophy appears to be at the heart of Aston Martin’s current crisis. The team’s early season problems have been linked to an aggressive package built around extreme installation choices, with Honda’s compromised power unit package and vibration concerns adding to the sense that Newey’s first Aston Martin has overreached badly.

Hill did not pretend otherwise. Instead he framed the situation as classic Newey: create the concept first, then force the team to make it work. He said: “The installation is good, but now we have to find out how to make it work, yeah. And he’ll keep pushing in that direction, and then something will come of it. And either it will never work, which is unlikely, because they nearly always do, but it will take some time.”

That is the key point. Hill is not arguing that Aston Martin is fine. He is arguing that Newey’s history says the pain may be part of the process.

Still, the scale of the current mess is impossible to ignore. Aston Martin have spent the first races of the season chasing basic functionality rather than fighting at the front. Reliability, driver discomfort and a lack of race pace have turned what was meant to be a statement year into a salvage operation.

Yet Hill still backed the architect behind it all: “It’s unlikely that what he’s doing won’t work. Something will come of continuing to push in that direction, but it will take time.”

The deeper issue raised by Hill and Hughes is whether Aston Martin have now handed Newey too much power. At Williams and McLaren, controls were imposed around him. At Red Bull, Christian Horner largely indulged him while still containing the wider structure. At Aston Martin, by contrast, Newey appears to have close to total technical authority.

That, for Hill, is where the tension lies: “How long will it take? Is he forcing a catastrophe by pushing things to such an extreme that the way he deals with them will overwhelm him?” Hill asked. Then came the answer that cuts to the heart of Newey’s character: “He’s someone who has a vision of perfection and wants everyone to unite, so he’ll be insistent.”

There is admiration in that assessment, but also warning. Newey does not compromise easily. He does not back away from his ideas because they are difficult. He doubles down. That makes him uniquely capable of finding performance others cannot see. It can also leave a team exposed when the concept underneath is not yet ready.

Hill reached for a biblical comparison to capture the dynamic now playing out at Silverstone: “He’s like Moses. Everyone wonders about the promised land and doubts they’ll reach it. But Adrian asks for faith that they’ll achieve it while they question whether he’s lost his mind.”

That may be the most accurate description yet of Aston Martin’s position. Newey is asking the team, Honda and probably Lawrence Stroll himself to keep believing while the car beneath them stumbles through one of the ugliest starts of any major project on the grid.

For Fernando Alonso, this is now another season of endurance rather than opportunity. For Aston Martin, the short term targets remain painfully modest: cure the vibration issues, get the Honda package under control, finish races and find some sort of stable base from which performance can grow.

Hill believes Newey can still get there. He also believes the signs, if they come, will only be visible later in the season: “I have faith that he’ll do it. I just think he knows that this will resolve itself. And when you look back at the start of the season, from the end of the season, there’ll be clear evidence that he’s been on the right track all along.”

They hired Newey to change everything. Right now, everything looks broken. But if Hill is right, Aston Martin are not watching a genius fail. They are watching him drag an overreaching idea through its ugliest phase before it becomes something formidable.

Miami now looms as the next checkpoint, not for miracles, but for proof that Newey’s chaos still leads somewhere worth going. And also for how long Lawrence Stroll's patience will last.