Damon Hill has never been shy about describing Adrian Newey’s genius with a little edge, and his latest take on Aston Martin’s miserable start to 2026 is as revealing as it is entertaining. Listening to Hill talk about Newey is to be reminded that the sport’s most influential designer doesn’t really “develop” a concept so much as pursue it — relentlessly — and that’s exactly what makes the opening rounds of this new Aston Martin-Honda era so intriguing.
Hill’s framing is brutally simple: this partnership could go supernova, or it could collapse into a black hole. The important bit is why he thinks those are the two outcomes. Newey’s instinct has always been to lean into the extreme, to keep pushing beyond the safe perimeter that most teams won’t cross unless the stopwatch forces them. Hill remembers that mindset from their Williams days.
“If you said to Adrian, ‘We’d be safe if we stayed within that circle’, he’d go, ‘Well, what happens when you go outside the circle?’” Hill said on *The Undercut* podcast.
That line lands because Aston Martin, right now, looks like a team that’s wandered outside the circle and discovered the consequences. The AMR26 arrived with huge expectation: Newey’s first full Aston Martin design, allied to Honda power. Some early pain was always part of the deal — new regulations, new integration challenges, a new technical direction — but the scale of the underperformance has been difficult to dress up as “teething”.
Honda, for its part, believes it has got on top of the battery vibration problems that hurt reliability early on. Aston Martin’s own messaging has been more nuanced. Mike Krack, the team’s chief trackside officer, has played down vibrations as a straight performance limiter, describing them more as a reliability headache than a reason for the lack of pace. Either way, the Japan weekend was a low point: Aston Martin was comfortably the slowest car over one lap.
Suzuka at least delivered a milestone. Fernando Alonso dragged the sole remaining AMR26 to the flag — Aston Martin-Honda’s first grand prix finish of the season — but it came in 18th. In other words, they got the car home, and it still looked nowhere.
And that’s where Hill’s read becomes less about lap time and more about human dynamics. Newey has defended the chassis, insisting the AMR26 is the “fifth-best” out there. That’s a fascinating claim in context, because it’s not a boast as much as a statement of belief: if the base car is good, then the problem is solvable. If it isn’t, the entire project starts to feel like a sunk-cost trap.
Hill’s point is that Newey’s approach virtually guarantees a phase where it looks like the whole thing might be unravelling — because the big gains, if they arrive, tend to arrive after uncomfortable months of insisting on a direction nobody else can yet “see”.
“He’ll keep pushing in that direction,” Hill said. “And then something will come of it. Either it will never work — which is unlikely, because they nearly always do — but it will take some time.”
The danger, as Hill sees it, isn’t that Newey runs out of ideas. It’s that the organisation around him runs out of patience. Newey’s track record buys him time, but F1 doesn’t hand out infinite credit, especially when you’re being measured against teams you’d expect to beat. Hill alluded to that awkward reality: Aston Martin’s current level is barely better than “a team that’s never done it before”.
He then pushed the thought experiment to its uncomfortable end. Is there a point where Newey’s competitiveness — the same trait that has defined championship cars across eras — turns destructive when the results don’t come quickly enough?
“I think Adrian is someone who will have a vision of perfection, his idea of perfection, and will want to bring everyone on board with it,” Hill said, before reaching for a biblical analogy that will feel familiar to anyone who’s worked in an F1 factory during a painful development cycle. Newey as Moses, the rest of the team trudging after him, asking where exactly this promised land is meant to be.
At some stage, Hill suggests, it becomes less about the next update and more about belief. How long do people keep marching when the points column is still empty and the car is still being described in terms like “first finish” rather than “best result”?
And yet, Hill still lands on faith — not blind optimism, but faith rooted in knowing how these stories often go when Newey is involved. He comes back to the same conclusion: this will resolve itself. There will be a point later in the year where the early-season mess looks less like confusion and more like the cost of choosing a difficult route.
“I have faith that he’ll do it,” Hill said. “I get the sense with him, he knows that this will resolve itself… when you look back at the start of the season, from the end of the season, there’ll be clear evidence that he’s been on the right track all along.”
For Aston Martin, that’s the tightrope. Right now, they’re bottom of the Constructors’ standings in the early part of 2026, with newcomers Cadillac the only other team yet to score. That’s not a place a project with this level of ambition is supposed to be — not with Newey on the pitwall, not with Alonso still capable of wringing lap time out of almost anything.
But Hill’s argument is that this is exactly the kind of moment where you learn what a team really is. Does it flinch, dilute the concept, start looking for safer answers? Or does it take the hit, absorb the noise, and keep moving in the same direction until the car catches up with the theory?
Aston Martin hired Newey because he doesn’t stay inside the circle. The early evidence says they’re paying the price for that. The bigger question — the only one that matters — is whether they’re about to get the reward.
