Bernie Collins sounds the alarm: Aston’s Newey era may start with turbulence
Aston Martin has spent the winter turning up the volume. Adrian Newey arrived in March with the kind of star power that changes how a factory hums, and the Honda works partnership lands in 2026. The new factory is online, the wind tunnel is fresh, the ambitions are loud. And yet, one of the people who knows the team best is preaching patience.
“It’s going to be a really difficult year for them,” Bernie Collins told Sky Sports, cutting through the hype with the cool realism of a former Aston strategist. Her point isn’t that Newey won’t move the needle — few designers in F1 history have bent the competitive order like he has — but that Aston is trying to juggle too many bowling balls at once.
Engine change on the horizon. Gearbox changes. A new chief designer. A new wind tunnel. A new factory. Oh, and Newey stepping into a dual brief as both lead designer and team principal. Any one of those elements can trip a team for a season. Stack them, and year one becomes a stress test.
This is, in many ways, the story of Aston Martin’s project since the team’s 2023 highs. Fernando Alonso gave the outfit its swagger back with those early podiums, but the development race bit hard and the team slid down the order. Last season brought more of that mid-grid frustration. Now, with the car built under a new roof and a technical structure reshaped around the sport’s pre-eminent thinker, the question isn’t talent — it’s integration.
Newey’s arrival changes the DNA. He doesn’t just draw fast race cars; he sets philosophies. The intrigue is how that meshes with the modern Aston structure day-to-day, from aero concepts to pit wall priorities to the resource split between 2025 and the big 2026 reset with Honda. The upside is obvious. The risk, as Collins warns, is that first-year turbulence is almost baked in.
“I think to do any of the little things they’ve done — change the engine, change the gearbox, change the chief designer, change the wind tunnel, have a new factory — any of those individual components would worry me for the performance of the team for the next year,” she said. “To change all of them together… I’m not sure how phenomenal it’s going to go year one.”
Aston doesn’t need reminding of that. New facilities rarely deliver instant laptime; they deliver correlation and learning that pay out over time. And while 2025 represents an opportunity to claw back ground, the real bet is clearly 2026, when the Honda works deal starts and the regulations hit the reset button again.
Inside the car, the driver equation remains a storyline that seems to run in loops. Lance Stroll attracts the usual noise as the team owner’s son, but Collins, who worked closely with him, pushed back on the lazy takes.
“I think he’s a much, much better driver than some of us give him credit for,” she said. He’s “not a million miles off,” and she expects him to remain part of the project so long as he wants to be. That stability matters in a year in which the team’s biggest opponent might be the calendar, not a rival garage.
So what does a “difficult year” actually look like? Not a disaster, necessarily — just the kind of season where Aston is tuning a car built amid moving targets, managing a new chain of command with Newey at the top, and fighting for consistency more than headline Sundays. The flashes will come. Newey cars tend to have them even when the puzzle’s incomplete. But the real measure might be less about points and more about whether the team’s improved tools, people and processes sing from the same sheet by Abu Dhabi.
It’s worth remembering: big projects don’t fail because of lack of ideas; they stumble on interfaces — how groups talk, how wind tunnel numbers match track reality, how the simulator earns trust, how the race team feeds the factory and vice versa. That’s the work ahead.
The hype is fair. So is the caution. If Aston Martin nails the joins, the Newey-Honda act could reshape the next era. Just don’t be shocked if 2025 feels like the part of the rollercoaster where you’re still climbing, listening to every click, waiting for the drop.
