Aston Martin turns to Ferrari sim sage as Newey pushes for a virtual-world reboot
Aston Martin has dipped into Ferrari’s old playbook to fix a very modern problem. Marco Fainello, the engineer who helped build Maranello’s simulation muscle during the Schumacher era, has joined the Silverstone team as a consultant, shoring up the very area Adrian Newey publicly circled in red earlier this year.
Newey, who arrived in March as managing technical partner and a shareholder, made his first race-weekend appearance in green at Monaco — and didn’t sugar-coat what he found behind the scenes. “It’s fair to say that some of our tools are weak,” he said then. “Particularly the driver-in-the-loop simulator needs a lot of work because it’s not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool.” He warned the fix could take up to two years.
Two years is a luxury Formula 1 rarely offers, especially with the 2026 rule reset thundering into view. That’s why Aston Martin has been hiring like a team with a deadline. Giles Wood, who worked with Newey at McLaren and Red Bull before a stint at Apple, returned last summer as simulation and vehicle modelling director. Enrico Cardile crossed from Ferrari to become chief technical officer. Nick Roberts, a seasoned strategist most recently with Racing Bulls, is due after gardening leave in time for 2026.
Fainello’s addition is the clearest sign yet that Aston Martin is treating simulation as the keystone of its 2026 project. The 61-year-old is no headline-chaser, but his fingerprints are all over Ferrari’s late-’90s and early-2000s rise. He joined in 1995, led vehicle dynamics from 1997 through 2004, and helped usher in Ferrari’s first simulator — the kind of foundational work that turns instinct into process and process into titles. After stints in road cars and GT racing, he left Maranello at the end of 2016. Now he’s back in F1, and he’s been recommended by Cardile, which tells you how closely Aston is aligning the pieces.
Strip away the job titles and the story is simple: Newey wants the virtual world to match the real one, fast. Under the 2026 regulations — 50 percent electrification, fully sustainable fuels, active aero — the winners won’t just be the teams with the best ideas; they’ll be the ones who can iterate them safely and quickly in a simulator before committing carbon fiber. If the driver-in-the-loop rig doesn’t “speak” the same language as the car, every decision costs time.
That’s where the Newey-Fainello-Wood axis matters. It’s a mix of concept, methodology, and execution built to tighten correlation: model the car accurately, teach the sim to capture the quirks, and turn Fernando Alonso’s and Lance Stroll’s feedback into data that actually points the right way. Get that loop closed and development unlocks. Leave it open and you chase ghosts.
Newey’s first clean-sheet car in green is the AMR26, and you sense he’s choreographing the shift to Honda power just as carefully. Aston Martin’s partnership with Honda begins next season under the new regulations, and integrating a fresh power unit philosophy with active aerodynamics is exactly the type of multidimensional problem simulation is supposed to de-risk. The head of aerodynamics can’t solve that alone. The sim team has to be trusted enough — and fast enough — to be the heartbeat of the factory.
Is the timeline brutal? Of course. Newey himself said the tools might need two years; the calendar offers closer to 18 months from Monaco’s reality check to Round 1 of 2026. That’s why this looks like a factory-first revolution as much as a car project. Strengthen the modelling team, bring in a heavyweight to define process, knit it together under a CTO who knows Fainello’s playbook, and give the race team a strategist already thinking 2026 scenarios. It’s not subtle. It’s necessary.
The intangible here is the driver bond. Alonso’s knack for shaping development with sharp, specific feedback is well known, and if there’s a driver you’d want anchoring correlation work through a rules reset, it’s the two-time champion. Newey has been selective with his trackside visits this year, but when he’s in the garage, those conversations write the to-do list as much as any CFD run.
Aston Martin has spent the last two seasons nudging at the front without quite barging through it. The hires of Cardile, Wood, Roberts, and now Fainello suggest an organisation being rebuilt to support the kind of technical aggression Newey thrives on. The car will get the attention in 2026. But the real story is happening in the sim suite, where every tenth will be earned twice: once on a screen, and again on Sunday.
The clock’s loud now. If Fainello and Co. can make the simulator sing in key with the AMR26, Aston Martin’s 2026 won’t just be about a new engine and a new set of rules. It might be the year their processes finally move as quickly as their ambition.
