Newey sees progress at Aston Martin, says Honda is behind where he hoped it would be

Aston Martin has endured a difficult 2026 season, but team principal Adrian Newey says the group is beginning to work more closely behind the scenes. At Friday’s FIA press conference at COTA, he described strong team spirit in the engineering offices and said they were generating many ideas.

“You can feel the buzz in the factory now,” Newey said, describing engineers talking with one another and working late. He also drew parallels with his start at Red Bull 20 years ago: both teams had faced changes of owners and senior managers, and he said the task was to get people working together, break down silos and improve the culture.

His assessment of Honda was more mixed. Newey said the manufacturer was slightly behind where he had hoped it would be, and thought Honda had probably been disappointed by the progress it made in 2026. He compared its position with where Red Bull picked it up in 2019; Honda had already been back in F1 for four seasons by then, following its 2015 return, while 2026 is its first season back.

That optimism sits against a tough season on track: Aston Martin had a poor Singapore weekend despite expecting the AMR26 to suit the circuit. In Austin, Alonso and Stroll finished first practice 12th and 13th, a good opening to the weekend.

Newey knows Honda from their successful Red Bull partnership and said he had every confidence it would accelerate quickly and understand the current power-unit regulations. He cited the manufacturer’s determination, good people and processes, and several development projects that were still at an early stage but looked promising. Progress, he cautioned, would not happen overnight.