Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles.
One app.

Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles. One news app.

Motorsport

Who slept worst last night: Adrian Newey

Adrian Newey Honda Aston Martin Fernando Alonso Christian Horner Koji Watanabe Lance Stroll Phil Connors Aston (Organization) McLaren

They say we’re young and we don’t know

We won’t find out until we grow…

In the classic comedy movie Groundhog Day, the karmic punishment that time itself is inflicting on misanthropic TV weatherman Phil Connors is heralded by the flipping of the digits on a 1970s clock radio, as 5.59am becomes 6.00am and the alarm triggers to the strains of Sonny and Cher’s classic I Got You Babe. As Connors repeats the same day over and over again for what amounts to years of his life, the clock begins to act as the cinematic equivalent of a Greek chorus; the turning of the plain Helvetica digits is rendered in grotesque slow-motion close-up, as if they were immense icebergs grinding against one another, or skyscrapers toppling.

Fernando Alonso could tell Adrian Newey a lot about being seemingly doomed to repeat the same farce day in, day out, for that was his lot when the dream reunion of McLaren and Honda in 2015 turned into the proverbial nightmare. Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on repetition compulsion were informed by observation of injured soldiers reliving past traumas in their dreams; Alonso must be aghast to see history repeating not just in his head, but around him in real time.

Newey, famously, disdains the limelight, abhors pointless meetings, avoids ‘doing media’, and is happiest when resolving problems creatively at the drawing board. He must see the ninth circle of hell approaching, because Aston Martin’s dire competitive situation can’t be smoothed away by spending a few hours in blissful seclusion behind the easel with only his pencils and French curves for company.

No, this is going to take meetings – and lots of them. Sadly, it’s also going to require more leveraging of his profile to lobby for the extraordinary concessions Honda will need to fix its PU’s many issues.

Aston Martin’s AMR26 came freighted with expectations, given Newey’s high-profile hiring as ‘managing technical partner’ last year and a new, exclusive power unit supply deal with Honda, who most recently propelled Max Verstappen to four consecutive world championships. But the car was finished late, and the team had to bail out of pre-season testing early when engine vibrations damaged its available stock of energy stores.

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing (Photo by: Lars Baron / Getty Images)

Word had already been circulating that the Honda PU was up to 15kg overweight, but that issue evaporated into insignificance in comparison with the vibrations – which, it was later revealed, not only munched through batteries but also caused the cars’ mirrors to fall off and made the drivers’ hands go numb after completing just a handful of laps. Post-testing, Honda evaluated a number of solutions on the dyno, but it was clear when the reclusive Newey convened a press conference first thing on Thursday morning of the Australian GP weekend that all was not well.

When Andy Cowell was ousted as CEO and team principal late last year, and Newey added most of those duties to his remit, there was naturally some confusion given the eminent engineer’s manifest dislike of any task that requires him to be ‘front of house’. We were assured that this ghastly element of the job description would slide down the desk towards chief trackside officer Mike Krack, who himself had been headhunted from Formula E for the team principal role before being supplanted by Cowell at the end of 2024.

(Parenthetically speaking, job insecurity at Aston Martin is such that any mention of senior staff tends to require a recap, in the way new episodes of TV drama series begin with a “Previously on…” Perhaps Honda could learn something from the bearing technology employed to enable the revolving door at the Silverstone Campus to spin so freely? But I digress.)

So, with Newey already scheduled to appear in the Friday FIA conference, it was something of a surprise to be invited into his presence on the Thursday too, with Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe also in attendance. It was clear he wanted to send some sort of message.

What a shame, then, that the PA system had decided to echo the car in terms of dysfunction, leaving Newey resembling 1970s British TV comedian Norman Collier performing his popular ‘broken microphone’ routine as the sound cut in and out. It never rains but it pours.

Newey was left audibly – if only to those within actual earshot – cursing the chaos with choice phraseology which rhymed with “clucking bell”. A pity Collier is no longer with us, having died in 2013; Aston could have invited him along to distract the audience by performing his other staple routine, a chicken impression.

Koji Watanabe, President, CEO and Representative Director of Honda Racing Corporation (Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images)

This was not an auspicious start to the weekend. Veritably, in Oz the wizard looked very much like a man who wished fervently to disappear behind his curtain once more.

Matters weren’t helped by Watanabe turning up with a pre-prepared spiel that he read from a tablet, thereafter saying very little in response to questions, leaving Newey to seize the microphone and – no doubt praying the “effing thing” worked – push the narrative on. Well, the revelations were sufficiently explosive that the torment was worth it: headline news.

Although drivers Alonso and Lance Stroll later played down the claims that the vibrations were so bad they were likely to incur serious nerve damage in their hands if they drove for too long, the story was already out and running. It’s clear the purpose of revealing the depths of the technical problems, and framing this as a potential safety issue, is a tactic to persuade F1’s stakeholders to give Honda a break.

What Newey needs is for Honda to be allowed to upgrade its engine sooner than would otherwise be permitted under the FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) framework, and to make more than the two corrective measures granted by the same rubric. At the moment, the first ‘evaluation interval’ is after race six – Miami at the earliest, but more likely Monaco given the almost inevitable cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia rounds.

So the man who hates both politics and PR is having to expend vital mental bandwidth on both, walking a tortuous diplomatic line between holding Honda’s feet to the fire and dynamiting the relationship in the same way McLaren did in 2017. All the revelations of this past week, including the rather preposterous claim that Aston Martin’s leaders only learned last November of how few personnel remained from the previous collaboration with Red Bull, served this purpose.

Newey had to throw Honda far enough under the bus to build a strong case for concessions without actually ending the collaboration. Because historic precedent demonstrates Honda gets to the top at some point – just not always on a timescale in sync with its partners.

Adrian Newey, Aston Martin Racing (Photo by: Joe Portlock / Getty Images)

None of these manoeuvrings are adding performance to the car in the short term – as Newey made clear in the FIA press conference, Aston Martin can’t learn about the car and establish an optimal upgrade path if it can only run it for a few laps at a time, and at a much-reduced pace. In Sunday’s grand prix, Alonso aced the start to briefly run 10th from 17th on the grid before slipping back, but then pitted after 15 laps so the team could “make some adjustments”.

11 laps later Alonso returned to the fray, essayed a handful more laps, then retired “to conserve components”. Essentially the team has no more batteries beyond the ones already fitted to the cars.

Stroll also lost time in the garage, completed just 43 of the 58 laps, and was officially a DNF. China, where there is a sprint race as well as a Grand Prix, will be a challenge.

Honda, for its part, is also experiencing its own Groundhog Day, for there are parallels here with its first entry into the hybrid formula, when the fundamental issue was one of translating dyno performance into real-world operating conditions. In 2015, McLaren co-authored the failure by insisting on a ‘size zero’ engine for aerodynamic purposes, but in 2017 vibrations unseen on the dyno caused repeated oil tank ruptures while out in the field.

Money has never been in short supply during the Aston Martin F1 project, but owner Lawrence Stroll – infamously – has rather shorter reserves of patience. Plenty of high-profile staff have been hired at great expense and then departed amid a flurry of restructurings. With each passing embarrassment, the chance of another brutal game of Spin The P45 grows.

Newey is wealthy enough to retire but he remains a fiercely competitive individual, and one who prizes the value he adds to projects. A recurring theme throughout his career has been a desire to prove himself; in his own autobiography, he concedes that one of the motivations for leaving Williams was to dismiss the widespread perception that he needed to be “reined in” by grown-ups. At McLaren he felt his salary wasn’t concomitant with the contribution he made to performance.

At Red Bull his schism with former team principal Christian Horner began when Horner gave the infamous interview in which he claimed Newey only worked three days a week. That moved his star engineer to fire off a furious multi-page memo detailing every design aspect of the car he had touched.

It’s unthinkable for Newey to end his career on a note of catastrophic failure. But the immediate future of Aston Martin’s F1 project is a tapestry of track sessions in which, day in, day out, the AMR26 barely completes a handful of laps if it is seen at all, followed by races in which is barely figures.

In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors escapes his punishment by becoming a better man. What Newey needs is a better PU. But when will he get it?

They say love won’t pay the rent…