Inside Aston Martin’s 2026 skunkworks: Cardile lifts the lid on working with Newey
Adrian Newey has barely unpacked and he’s already dictating the shape of Aston Martin’s 2026 car. That’s the message from Enrico Cardile, the team’s chief technology officer, who’s swapped Maranello red for Aston green and now shares a corridor — and a project — with the most decorated designer in Formula 1 history.
Cardile describes Newey not as a single hire, but as three departments in one. Chief designer. Vehicle dynamics lead. Aero boss. All wrapped into a single, relentlessly curious engineer who still carries a notebook and still seems to see solutions others don’t.
“He’s uncompromising,” Cardile says, in that admiring tone engineers reserve for other engineers. The goal is the goal, and Newey will push the project — and everyone on it — to reach it. Budget doesn’t come first. Perfection does.
What’s striking, as Cardile tells it, isn’t just the insistence. It’s the follow-through. Newey doesn’t toss down an idea and leave the room. When he wants the car to do something, he already has a map of how to make it happen. If a group hits a wall, he dives back in with the detail needed to turn the sketch into a surface, the surface into a package, and the package into a lap time. High-level vision when that’s required; nuts-and-bolts feasibility when it isn’t going to get done otherwise.
That duality, Cardile argues, comes from longevity and timing. Newey grew up in an era when F1 teams were compact, resources were thin, and a single engineer might have a hand in everything. He rode the wave as the sport industrialised, staying on top of each new tool and technique along the way. The result: one person who can credibly sit across disciplines in a sport that has sliced itself into ever-finer specialisms.
“Talking with him is like talking with a modern F1 team at the same time,” Cardile says. It’s not hyperbole when you remember the CV.
Aston Martin has given that mind serious remit. Newey joined as managing technical partner, a role that goes beyond consultancy and into the bones of car concept and integration — and, crucially, gives him a stake in the project’s success. Cardile, who rose through Ferrari to become chassis technical director before switching camps, now oversees the broader architecture while working side by side with Newey on the car that will meet Formula 1’s sweeping regulation change in 2026.
Everyone is building a new car for that rules reset. Aston is building an identity. Under Lawrence Stroll, the team has already spent its money on infrastructure and people; now it’s spending its time. What Cardile outlines is a culture shift as much as a design direction — a place where the group is encouraged to chase the perfect solution rather than the easy one, and where the most senior voice in the room is also willing to get into the weeds to make it real.
There’s a practical effect to that, beyond the romance. In a grid where departments can calcify and hand-offs slow progress, the Newey-Cardile axis sounds intent on stitching concept, aero, suspension and vehicle dynamics into a single conversation. That’s how you make a car feel like it was born coherent rather than assembled compatible.
The office layout matters here too. Cardile laughs that they’re next door. That proximity means fewer slide decks and more pencils, fewer meetings and more momentum. When timelines collapse — as they will — that’s the difference between a tidy idea and a fast one.
None of this guarantees Aston Martin will arrive in 2026 with a world-beater. New regulations level the playing field until someone finds a ledge, and then they don’t. But if you were looking for signs that this is more than a headline hire, Cardile’s testimony provides one: the most famous designer of the modern era isn’t hovering. He’s driving the development, shaping the targets and backing the teams to hit them.
The phrasing Cardile kept returning to was revealing: no compromise. It’s a philosophy that can be uncomfortable inside a cost cap and a calendar this dense. It’s also how the defining cars of an era tend to get made.
If Aston Martin is to make one of those, this is the blueprint. A small, tight group at the top, big ambitions beneath, and a 2026 car being built not as a series of parts, but as a single thought.
