“We’ve tried to do the opposite, which is why we’ve really focused on the fundamentals, put our effort into those. Knowing that some of the appendages – wings, bodywork, things that can be changed in season – will hopefully have development potential…
“The AMR26 that races in Melbourne is going to be very different to the one people saw at the Barcelona Shakedown, and the AMR26 that we finish the season with in Abu Dhabi is going to be very different to the one that we start the season with.
“It’s very important to keep an open mind.”
Aston Martin comfortable with taking risks
Teams are presented with a very difficult challenge by these new regulations. Owing to the comprehensive changes on the engine and chassis side, there is always a risk of getting things badly wrong.
With testing so limited, teams must trust in their own hypothesis and simulation tools in the factory. For various reasons, this creates the possibility for engineers to make fundamentally wrong assumptions.
As the ground-effect cars demonstrated, recovering from a slow start can be immensely tough.
Mercedes, for example, never truly came back from their ‘zeropod’ solution and the subsequent rebuild that it triggered. Elsewhere, the likes of McLaren only increased their advantage after achieving a better grasp of the basics than their rivals.
Returning to Aston Martin, there are plenty of reasons to be fearful about the 2026 regulations. So much has changed at the Silverstone factory over the last eighteen months – from the facilities to senior personnel to the power unit.
Maybe this is the reason why Adrian Newey and Enrico Cardile are so comfortable with a bold approach.
As Newey explains, time constraints have somewhat forced Aston to take risks:
“The reality is that we didn’t get a model of the ’26 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April,” reveals Aston Martin’s team principal.
“Whereas most, if not all of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year. (cont. on next page)
