Adrian Newey has laid bare Aston Martin’s difficult 2026 season, with the Aston Martin Hungary upgrade at the centre of the team’s response, one major package rather than a string of small ones, and it’s not here yet. The package lands in Hungary on both cars. Until then the team keeps absorbing a season where, in Newey’s own words, they’ve effectively been standing still while everyone else adds performance. Speaking to the Aston Martin website ahead of the British Grand Prix, Newey laid out why the car started the year overweight and behind, what’s been rebuilt inside the factory to stop it happening again, and why Fernando Alonso’s future is now framed around whether the Hungary upgrade shows clear, tangible progress.
Key Points: Aston Martin Hungary Upgrade
- Newey confirms the major upgrade arrives in Hungary on both cars, a single big package rather than incremental updates
- Work on the 2026 car didn’t start until mid-March 2025, with a wind tunnel model not ready until mid-April, leaving Aston Martin months behind rivals from the outset
- Newey admits the chassis is significantly overweight, partly from Honda integration and vibration issues, partly from a rushed design process
- Internal systems described as “patched and bodged for years” are being overhauled, with more components now produced in-house including the gearbox casing and floor
- Newey reveals he was “not 100 per cent last year” through a period of illness, managing health and work in parallel
- Fernando Alonso’s future is framed around whether the upgrade shows clear, tangible progress
The Upgrade That’s Still On Its Way
Nothing has landed yet. That’s the part worth sitting with before anything else. Aston Martin haven’t been chasing small gains race by race in 2026. They’ve held the line, taken the pain weekend after weekend, and put everything into one package due in Hungary. Newey confirmed it directly when asked when fans would see it.
The scale of it isn’t small either. Core chassis and gearbox architecture stays the same, but both have had weight stripped out, which forced Aston Martin to re-homologate and crash test the forward chassis from scratch. Front suspension unchanged, rear suspension revised, a new nose and substantially reworked aero surfaces on top. Newey was reluctant to put a number on the expected gain before the car actually runs, but the language around it, a “large step,” is not how he talks about a routine update. As Andrew Benson reported for BBC Sport, Aston Martin are currently averaging 3.4 seconds off the pace this season, and even a two-second improvement would only lift them into the midfield, still behind Alpine and Racing Bulls.
There’s a second layer to it that won’t be visible in lap time straight away. Aston Martin’s simulation tools, the physics models behind the development process, are being rebuilt as well. Newey was clear those gains take longer to show up because the tools need time to correlate properly against the real car. Hungary is the headline moment. The full benefit of what’s changing behind it arrives later in the year.
Why It Took This Long
The honesty about the season’s starting point is what stands out most. Aston Martin didn’t begin serious work on the 2026 car until mid-March 2025, and didn’t get a model into the wind tunnel until mid-April. Newey called that gap to rivals huge, and the season since has borne that out.
“We’ve got a very talented group of people, but as an organisation we weren’t yet working together as well as you would like and operating as one cohesive unit. Expectations were sky-high, but the reality of where we were didn’t match that.”
Adrian Newey, Aston Martin
The weight problem is the clearest symptom. Newey put it down to two things layered on top of each other: integrating the Honda power unit and working through vibration issues, plus a rushed design process where weight saving is usually the first thing sacrificed when time runs out. The aerodynamic direction, which he says was largely his own call, was committed to without the chance to explore multiple concepts properly. It threw up problems nobody had time to anticipate.
Melbourne was the moment it became unavoidable. Power unit issues meant Aston Martin’s first proper running of the season came in FP3 at the Australian Grand Prix, after time in Barcelona and two Bahrain tests largely lost just trying to get the power unit to run correctly with the chassis and gearbox.
What’s Being Rebuilt Behind The Scenes
Newey was direct about the cause running deeper than a late start. The internal systems Aston Martin were working with, he said, had been patched and bodged for years, with some of it tracing back to the team’s earliest days as Jordan at Silverstone, long before the Aston Martin name returned to the grid. Parts weren’t arriving when they should have, not because people weren’t doing their jobs, but because the system underneath them was failing.
The response has been to bring more of the build in-house. The gearbox casing is now manufactured at the factory. Floor patterns and floors themselves are made there too. Components that used to go out to third parties are coming back under Aston Martin’s own roof, which Newey says gives the team better cost control but, more importantly, tighter control over its own destiny, with quicker feedback between research, design and manufacture.
“You walk around the AMR Technology Campus at night and the lights are still on. There are a lot of late evenings, a lot of motivation, and a real determination to prove that we can do this.”
Adrian Newey, Aston Martin
Newey’s Own Health, And The Team Around Him
Newey’s absence from the public side of the team in recent months hasn’t gone unnoticed. He addressed it without dressing it up. A spell of illness took him away from the day to day, and he admitted he wasn’t fully fit through last year, having to balance health and work more carefully than usual. He credits the engineers around him for keeping things running through it without a significant blip.
The team principal role itself is structured differently at Aston Martin than at most. Newey took over the team principal position in November 2025, when Cowell was moved from team boss and chief executive into a Chief Strategy Officer role. Newey describes the title itself as a formal FIA requirement more than a job description, with the actual weight of it being that key strategic decisions stop with him, alongside executive chairman Lawrence Stroll on the biggest calls. The public, trackside face of the team belongs to Chief Trackside Officer Mike Krack, freeing Newey to focus on engineering, long-term strategy and direction from Silverstone.
What Hungary Means For Alonso
The upgrade isn’t just a technical milestone. Newey made clear it carries real weight for Fernando Alonso’s future with the team. Both drivers have shown frustration through the season, some of it spilling into the media, which Newey frames as understandable from competitive drivers wanting to fight at the front rather than a sign of anything deeper wrong.
“Fernando is really looking forward to the upgrade and, if it performs we hope he’ll be in the cockpit for another season. Given his experience, his feel for the car, his ability to guide development, he’s a tremendous asset. But he wants to see clear, tangible progress. If we can show that we’re moving decisively in the right direction, he’s absolutely committed to being behind the wheel.”
Adrian Newey, Aston Martin
That’s a direct line drawn between a package that has not raced yet and a driver decision that affects the whole shape of Aston Martin’s project beyond 2026. Hungary isn’t just a development checkpoint at this point. It’s the moment Aston Martin find out whether the season’s pain bought them anything.
Coffee Corner Take
This was supposed to be the season Aston Martin made the step up. They had the parts to do it. Newey, the factory investment, Honda arriving as a manufacturer partner, the kind of build that other midfield teams spend a decade trying to assemble. The reality this year hasn’t matched that ambition, and it’s worth saying plainly rather than dancing round it.
The troubles are well documented at this point. Late start on the car, the weight problem, the systems that needed rebuilding from the ground up, and Andy Cowell expected to leave later this season after being moved from team boss to Chief Strategy Officer when Newey took over. All of it adds to the scale of what Aston Martin are trying to stabilise. None of that is in dispute.
But leading this project is the most successful designer in Formula 1 history. That’s not a small detail to set against a difficult year. Newey has rebuilt teams from worse positions than this before, and the sport has shown plenty of times that this kind of turnaround takes time, not a single race weekend. Hungary is the next test.
Aston Martin’s future still depends a great deal on what happens next. Whether the upgrade delivers, whether the structure underneath it holds, whether Alonso sees enough to stay patient. But with Newey at the centre of it, betting against this team finding its way back is a bet I’d want to think twice about.
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