Adrian Newey has never been shy about leaving fingerprints on a car in ways that go beyond lap time, and Aston Martin’s AMR26 has already offered its first tell. When the team finally rolled its 2026 machine out in Barcelona for last week’s shakedown, the photos did the rounds for one detail in particular: a neat set of “horns” flanking the roll hoop, a clear nod to one of Newey’s most recognisable old solutions.
It’s a familiar silhouette for anyone who still has the MP4-20 burned into their memory. Newey first popularised the concept at McLaren in 2005, and it became part of the car’s visual identity in the final V10 season. Aston’s version is smaller and cleaner, but it’s the same idea — an aerodynamic flick of the wrist in a ruleset that, as ever, forces designers to get creative about what they can feed to the rear of the car.
In Newey’s own words back then, the “horns” weren’t there for show. Speaking to ITV during that 2005 campaign, he framed them as a way of improving what arrives at the rear wing: the regulations constrict wing span, so you look elsewhere for performance, including shaping the flow before it even reaches the wing. The horns, he explained, modify that approach flow to increase rear-wing downforce. Two decades later, he’s reached for the same toolbox again — and that says as much about his design instincts as it does about where the new 2026 aerodynamics are already pushing teams.
Aston Martin’s AMR26 is the first car Newey has penned for the team, and it has landed with the kind of curiosity normally reserved for a title favourite. The Barcelona running itself didn’t offer much in the way of representative pace — nor was it meant to. The car first appeared on the penultimate day at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with Lance Stroll completing five laps on Thursday afternoon before Fernando Alonso took over for the final day.
Alonso logged 49 laps on Friday and ended the test with the 10th-fastest time, 4.447s off the benchmark set by Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari. That gap tells you basically nothing without context, and the paddock knows it: shakedown laps are about systems checks, aero correlation, and making sure the thing does what it’s told before the serious mileage begins.
What’s more revealing at this stage is what Aston has chosen to show the world. The AMR26 has already been flagged up as one of the more visually distinctive cars on the 2026 grid, and not just because of the roll-hoop furniture. There’s a sense that this is Newey leaning into the regulations with confidence — not playing it safe, not chasing the average.
Technical observers have pointed to a wider nose than many rivals, which inevitably drags you back to Red Bull’s long-running philosophy from the Vettel era, when Newey’s cars married strong front-end authority with aggressive aero packaging. It’s not that a wide nose is a “Newey signature” on its own, but it does hint at the direction of travel: what compromises Aston is willing to accept and where it believes the bigger gains are hiding.
The sidepods, too, have sparked that familiar first-look reaction — the same kind of “hang on, they’ve really done that?” moment Mercedes generated when it unveiled its zero-pod concept at the start of 2022. That doesn’t mean it’s the same idea, or that it’ll have the same fate. It does mean Aston has arrived in 2026 with a car designed to provoke discussion, and in Formula 1 that usually happens when a team believes it has found something worth protecting.
There are also hints, in the way the bodywork meets the floor, of older concepts being reinterpreted. The cavernous-looking space between the sidepod undercut and the floor edge has been compared to the kind of “double-floor” thinking teams have dabbled with across different eras — from Ferrari’s ill-fated F92A in 1992 to Toro Rosso’s SRT6 in 2011. In modern ground-effect F1, floor performance is king, so any team presenting a floor-fed concept that looks unusual is effectively inviting everyone to squint at the same area in the pitlane.
Even the rear-end architecture has its little echoes. The rear wing pillar treatment has been likened to what McLaren ran in 2009 — a car that wasn’t a Newey design, but one that, as the saying goes, might have been influenced by ideas sketched earlier and left waiting for the right moment. In F1, “new” is often just “old, but now legal and useful again”.
That’s the point with the horns, really. They’re not a nostalgia play. They’re a reminder that Newey’s best work has always been rooted in how he sees airflow, and how relentlessly he looks for ways around the edges of prescriptive rules. The MP4-20 was adored because it was fast and beautiful, but it also became a cautionary tale — 10 wins from 19 races and a genuine title shot for Kimi Räikkönen, undermined by reliability issues that handed Alonso and Renault the championship. Great ideas don’t automatically guarantee trophies.
For Aston Martin, that’s the looming question now. The AMR26 has already generated buzz because it looks like it’s trying something, not because it’s proven anything. Alonso’s mileage in Barcelona was useful, Stroll’s short first outing was symbolic, and the lap times were background noise. The real story is that Aston has put a Newey car on track and it immediately looks like a Newey car — not in branding, but in intent.
Whether those horns end up being a clever aerodynamic flourish or simply the most visible clue to a deeper philosophy will take longer to judge. But in a season where everyone is learning the same new set of rules at speed, Aston Martin has at least nailed the first part: it’s made the paddock look up.
