Walk into Aston Martin’s office after hours and there’s a fair chance Fernando Alonso is already hunched over a laptop, tapping his watch and wondering where everyone else is. That’s the picture Ben Michell paints of life inside Silverstone — a place where the drivers don’t just tolerate telemetry; they devour it.
Michell, now Aston Martin’s head of performance optimisation, has seen the full spectrum up close. He worked trackside with Sebastian Vettel, then served as Lance Stroll’s race engineer from 2021 through 2024 before stepping up to his current role. His read on the trio of Alonso, Stroll and Vettel? All three love getting “buried in the data.” The trick is deciding when to feed that appetite and when to take the menu away.
“There are days when the plots and overlays unlock something, and days when it just adds noise,” Michell explains. His job — and every race engineer’s — is to sense which day it is. That can be as subtle as reading a hello in the morning, or knowing when not to drop a stack of aero maps on the desk. Sometimes it’s, “Get a gap on track and go express yourself.” Sometimes it’s a deep dive on the traces.
That balance has underpinned a tidy run into the 2025 summer break. Aston Martin scored in five of the last six races before the shutdown, with Hungary the pick of the bunch: both cars in Q3, Alonso fifth at the flag and Stroll seventh. It nudged the team up to sixth in the constructors’ standings and, more importantly, felt like proof of concept. The car is responsive. The drivers are engaged. The engineering loop is tight.
All of which feeds into the bigger picture: 2026, when the slate gets partially wiped clean. Adrian Newey is already leaving fingerprints on the wind tunnel model, and the Honda partnership looms as a major reset. CEO and team principal Andy Cowell says the place is buzzing with “more adventurous” concepts, with the pipeline from drawing board to tunnel now roughly a third of the time it used to take — a serious acceleration for any aero group.
Cowell’s message is blunt: tough targets, tougher deadlines, no illusions about the scale of the job. New fuel and lubricants with Aramco, in-house transmission and hydraulics, a fresh power unit relationship with Honda, plus a new aerodynamic rulebook. It’s a lot to knit together, and the supply chain is being asked to make more complex parts in less time with better precision. That’s the brief.
For now, the day job matters. Alonso and Stroll are turning in the kind of disciplined weekends that keep morale high and the factory hungry. And if the drivers want to spend their evenings nose-deep in overlays, Aston Martin won’t be standing in their way — they’ll just be smart about when to push more information across the table, and when to let instinct do the laptime.
