Adrian Newey will start at Aston Martin’s Technology Campus from next Monday, March 3. He will take on the role of Managing Technical Partner. Newey joins a largely reorganised technical structure under Aston Martin CEO Andy Cowell, who replaced Mike Krack as Team Principal a few weeks ago.
Krack has been repositioned into a more track-focused role, who is now Chief Trackside Officer. Meanwhile, Enrico Cardile, new Chief Technical Officer, will be the Technical Director and lead the technical team’s development.
Cardile will be at the Silverstone HQ when he officially begins his new role after leaving Ferrari last year.
Cardile was initially expected at Silverstone in January, but as we reported a few weeks ago there were still some ‘bureaucratic’ problems to resolve before his official arrival at Aston Martin.
His move to the Silverstone team has now become a real issue, given that Andy Cowell has not been able to provide a real start date for the Italian engineer.
Last July, Ferrari announced the resignation of their former technical director. However, Aston Martin and the Italian team still haven’t reached an an agreement to release the Italian engineer before the usual 12-18 months of gardening leave for senior personnel.
It is clear that Ferrari has every interest in delaying Cardile’s entry into Aston Martin. This would make him less decisive in their choices towards 2026 and the new development.
Aston seems to be experiencing a battle similar to the one they faced when trying to sign Dan Fallows from Red Bull. On that occasion, a major legal battle postponed his arrival at Aston Martin.
While Cowell was unable to provide an update on when Cardile is expected to start work at Silverstone, he was quick to say that work on the 2026 car is progressing according to plan.
He insisted that Aston Martin’s new additions will simply complete the structure when they come on board.
There’s a large group of people already working on the 2026 car. Of course, the more people we add, the stronger we become and the more knowledge we have, the more experience we have to push ourselves further and further,” said Andy Cowell in Bahrain.
Cowell was announced by Aston Martin in October and within weeks he had committed to making the team’s structure more efficient, spending several months evaluating the team’s operations before implementing his new structure, which he describes as “flatter” and “more efficient”.
While Cardile’s arrival date at Aston Martin remains secret and uncertain, there are only a few days left to see Adrian Newey fully operational in the Silverstone factory as Managing Technical Partner.
Newey will have a brand new wind tunnel, which is in the final and delicate calibration phase. He will also benefit from cutting-edge simulator that has been in use for several months now. Of course, there is also the presence of Honda and Aramco as technical partners for the 2026 power unit.
All these ingredients, according to Lawrence Stroll, should make Aston Martin contenders in 2026.
“We are all very excited to be working with Adrian. His CV speaks for itself,” said Cowell in Bahrain.
“That’s why we can’t wait to welcome him to the headquarters,. Introduce him to our team, show him the company’s tools to design the car.
“And then get down to work on creating a competitive car for 2026, also helping to improve the AMR25”.
