Aston Martin: Newey 100% designing time is focused on 2026

Aston Martin F1 team principal Andy Cowell told reporters at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix that the Briton could still have an indirect influence on the current car through wind tunnel correlation, however.

Cowell insisted: "A hundred percent of Adrian's designing time is focused on 2026. There was a period of him getting up to speed with the regulations (due to 'gardening leave'), with the concept work that we've been doing in the preceding couple of months and there are some tough deadlines to meet.

"The (first) test (of 2026) is at the end of January so getting a car ready for that point requires slightly earlier decision points and clearly everything's new but there's zero carry over. So there's lots of work there and Adrian's just been focused on that."

Aston Martin are P7 in the 10-team standings, with double F1 world champion Fernando Alonso yet to score in four races and Lance Stroll drawing a blank in the last two.

The team finished P5 in 2023 and 2024 in the Constructors' standings and ambitious Canadian billionaire owner Stroll has invested heavily in facilities and talent as he targets the championship.

Aston Martin is ditching Mercedes to start an exclusive partnership with Honda which has parted ways with Red Bull.

They now have a new wind tunnel at Silverstone fully operational since the start of the season and Cowell said the team were able to correlate data from that with what was happening at the track: "The quality of the data that we get out of the tunnel is very good and it's just a case of aligning it with what we can measure at the circuit.

Alonso told reporters earlier that he was hoping for a better weekend in Jeddah and motivation was high and he "totally supported" Newey's focus on the future.

"We're still actually discovering a little bit the car and some of the weaknesses. I would say that the first four grands prix, the low-speed corners were probably our weakest part of the track.

"But there are some concerns as well, of bouncing and other stuff that we are facing from time to time. We are working hard on improving those," said Alonso.

Newey was responsible for designing the eight F1 title winning cars that powered, first Sebastian Vettel, and more recently Max Verstappen to the four world titles they owe the English engineering guru.