New Aston Martin Formula 1 CEO Andy Cowell says that no one in the team is “living in a bubble of happiness” given the current form of the AMR24 and the need to improve in every area.
Former Mercedes HPP boss Cowell started work at the Silverstone outfit late last month, and is making his first appearance at a race in Austin this weekend.
He replaces Martin Whitmarsh, with whom he is temporarily working in parallel while he gets to know the team.
He made it clear that everyone in the camp is aware of the need to get better results.
“I think we’re disappointed where we are,” said Cowell. “Everybody is, I haven’t met anybody that’s living in a bubble of happiness thinking that we’re achieving greatness.
“And it’s everywhere we need to get better. There isn’t the single area of the business that is saying to me, we’re perfect, we’re ready to win championships. Everywhere is saying, yeah, we could do that’s better, we’d like to do this, this is our road map to get to a place where we think we’re great.
“And then we’ll talk about it, but then when we’re there, we’ll have more ideas won’t we? So there isn’t a single area that is perfect yet, and we will probably never reach perfection, because we’ll always come up with better ways of improving every single department of the business.”
Regarding his role in making that happen Cowell added: “My job is to create a team, and in a team, everybody knows what their role is. They know their position on the pitch. And my job is to discuss with each of those players what they could do to get better.
“It’s not to tell them. It’s just instil a high performing atmosphere of doing something, learning from that experience, thinking of new ideas, going again.
“I guess every single project I want us to get better at, it’s not just targeting one point. Yes, that is a change for us.
“But I want us to be amazingly creative on everything that we’re working on, and then really robotic with the way we do experiments, and we believe the result from the experiment.
“And we try and lose our emotional attachment to the idea when we look at the results, and we learn, and we just go back round that as fast as we can. That’s there at Silverstone, it’s just trying to nurture it and encourage it and so on.”
