Adrian Newey rarely does throwaway lines, so when he says Aston Martin’s AMR26 will be “very different” by the time it rolls onto the grid in Melbourne, it lands with a bit more weight than the usual pre-season theatre.
The car that ran at last week’s shakedown in Barcelona was already enough to get the paddock craning its neck. Even in a winter when everyone’s relearning the shape of Formula 1 under the 2026 ruleset, Aston Martin’s first Newey-era machine looked like it was trying to start an argument. A wide nose that immediately triggered memories of Red Bull’s early-2010s dominance, those unmistakable “horns” he once toyed with at McLaren, and a rear end that had rival engineers lingering longer than they’d admit.
George Russell, not exactly a man prone to handing out compliments to potential threats, called it “probably the most standout” car he’d seen — and singled out the rear suspension as “very impressive”. That’s not idle chatter; when drivers start talking about suspension detail, it usually means their technical people have pointed at something and gone: *that’s clever*.
Newey, though, is pointing everyone’s attention somewhere else: not to the novelty of what Aston showed, but to how quickly it’s going to move on.
“The AMR26 that races in Melbourne is going to be very different to the one people saw at the Barcelona shakedown,” he said in an interview with Aston Martin’s official channels. “And the AMR26 that we finish the season with in Abu Dhabi is going to be very different to the one that we start the season with.”
In other words: don’t get too attached to the version you’ve already seen.
There are two ways to read that. The first is the obvious one: most teams are going to look meaningfully different between shakedown, the Bahrain tests, and the season opener in Australia on March 8. The sport’s moved into an era where the “launch car” is often just a first draft, and the real specification appears when the freight hits the first flyaway.
The second reading is more interesting — and more Newey. It’s a statement of intent about how he wants Aston Martin to behave under these regulations. Not chasing an early, narrow optimum, but building a platform that can be developed aggressively without painting itself into a corner.
Newey himself has been open about that philosophy. He’s long said that under fresh rules, you’re hunting for ideas that are difficult to copy and, just as importantly, for a concept with headroom. He acknowledged that development potential has been a factor in how Aston approached the AMR26.
“We’ve attempted to build something that we hope will have quite a lot of development potential,” he said. “What you want to try to avoid is a car that comes out quite optimised within its window but lacks a lot of development potential.
“We’ve tried to do the opposite, which is why we’ve really focused on the fundamentals… knowing that some of the appendages – wings, bodywork, things that can be changed in season – will hopefully have development potential.”
That tells you plenty about what Aston thinks it’s doing here. A team truly confident it has nailed the regulations doesn’t tend to talk about keeping an open mind; it talks about correlation, about numbers matching the tunnel, about “executing”. When the designer talks about fundamentals and headroom, it often means the first public version is only part of the picture — maybe even a deliberately conservative picture in some areas — because the architecture underneath is what matters.
It also explains why the AMR26 has looked like a scrapbook of Newey’s past, rather than a neat copy of what everyone else has interpreted from the rulebook. Engineers don’t recycle old motifs for nostalgia. If you see echoes of earlier Newey solutions, it’s because he still believes certain aerodynamic truths survive regulation shifts — and because the man has always been willing to take the long way round if it leads to a better destination by mid-season.
Aston Martin’s timing matters here. This is the first car fully shaped by Newey after his move from Red Bull, and it arrives at a moment when the grid is most vulnerable to disruption. New regulations are a reset button; the advantage goes to whoever makes the fewest wrong assumptions early. If Aston’s concept is genuinely different — not just visually, but in the way it behaves and scales with updates — then Newey’s “very different” promise starts to sound less like marketing and more like a warning.
And they won’t be alone in bringing meaningful changes to the first race. Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur has already indicated the Scuderia will effectively introduce a B-spec car during the final two Bahrain tests. Racing Bulls, too, expects a “significant update” to its VCARB03 ahead of the opener, according to team principal Alan Permane.
So yes, the whole field is about to shift.
But there’s a distinction between “we’ll bolt on the proper bodywork later” and “the car you saw isn’t really the car”. Newey’s language leans toward the latter. It suggests Aston’s Melbourne spec will carry more than the usual garnish — that the team is willing to treat these opening weeks as part of the car’s birth, not merely its debut.
That’s the intriguing part: Aston Martin isn’t just unveiling a design; it’s unveiling a development posture. Newey’s best cars were rarely static masterpieces. They were frameworks that could be exploited, iterated, and occasionally transformed once the competitive picture became clear.
Melbourne will tell us whether the AMR26’s headline shapes are genuine performance statements or simply the first visible layer of a deeper idea. Either way, if Newey is already telling you the real Aston Martin is still in the box, you’d be wise to believe him.
