Inside the glass-and-carbon corridors at Silverstone, one of F1’s most intriguing partnerships is taking shape. Fernando Alonso finally has Adrian Newey on his side, and the pair are already deep in the weeds, sketching out Aston Martin’s answer to the sport’s 2026 reset.
Alonso, never shy about the scale of his ambitions, sounds energised — and a little humbled — by the process. Speaking in-house at Aston Martin, he admitted you sometimes need “full brain capacity” just to keep up when Newey starts connecting the dots. The punchline? In those moments, Alonso says Newey’s only using “five percent.”
Strip away the humour and that’s exactly the point. Newey’s arrival gives Aston Martin a design lens few can match, just as F1 lurches into a new ruleset that will upend the competitive order. It’s the opportunity Lawrence Stroll’s project has been building toward: a clean-sheet car, built around a works power unit, guided by the most decorated designer the sport has ever seen.
The headline ingredients are obvious. On one side, a driver who’s been chasing a third world title since 2006, sharper than ever and still relentlessly curious; on the other, a man whose design fingerprints run through decades of championship-winning cars. Add Honda — set to power Aston Martin from 2026 — and you’ve got a factory alignment that finally gives Alonso the kind of full-stack platform he’s wanted since his McLaren-Honda reunion fell flat the first time around.
Early days, though. Alonso says the meetings with Newey have been light on beanbags and mood music, heavy on rules and feel. No deep dives into a specific winglet just yet; more of a calibration exercise. Where does the driver instinct meet the design intent? What trade-offs will help the guy in the cockpit extract more on a Sunday? What’s the effect on technique if the car goes this way, not that?
That feedback loop matters. The 2026 regulations promise sweeping changes to both chassis and power unit philosophies, and the teams that marry concept with usability will surface first. Newey, Alonso hints, is probing those intersections, seeing how his directions might change braking points, rotation, traction — the real on-track stuff. And when the questions come, they’re deceptively simple. The answers, even simpler — at least to him.
“He’s always in his room, at his drawing board,” Alonso said, painting the classic Newey picture. Focused, direct, deliberate. The message: the details will come when the car’s more mature. For now, it’s about the compass, not the map.
All of this lands as Aston Martin stands at a fork. The team has built the infrastructure — the wind tunnel, the talent pipeline, the upgraded campus — but step-changes in F1 don’t arrive by courier. They’re built across seasons. Newey’s presence accelerates the learning curve. Honda’s works deal completes the ecosystem. Put simply, Aston Martin won’t just be fitting someone else’s engine; they’ll be building a grand prix car with the power unit as a central design pillar. That’s a different game.
There’s also the Alonso factor. He’s not a passive participant in car development. He wants to understand the why behind every decision, to stress-test the idea until the gains are real. In that sense, driver and designer are a natural match: Newey sets the direction of travel; Alonso interrogates how it lives over a qualifying lap, in dirty air, with marginal tyres, with a title on the line.
Is this the combination that finally lifts Alonso to that long-awaited third crown? That’s the romance of it, sure. The reality is brutal: 2026 will scatter the deck, but someone still has to nail it. The good news for Aston Martin is that all the necessary conversations seem to be happening now, not later, and the two most important voices in the room are speaking the same language — even if one of them is doing the mental arithmetic faster than anyone else.
What does success look like in year one of the new era? A car that’s born competitive and grows quickly. A power unit and chassis that feel like they were designed in the same building. A driver who trusts the tools. Newey sketches the silhouette of that. Honda supplies the punch. Alonso supplies the edge.
The rest is the hard, unglamorous work of turning whiteboard lines into lap time. From the sound of it, that work is already well underway.
