Who is Adrian Newey, Aston Martin’s 2026 team principal?
- Maham Mir
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Written by Maham Mir, Edited by Meghana Sree
A look inside Adrian Newey’s illustrious Formula One career, as the most successful engineer in the sport is set to become a team principal for the first time with Aston Martin.
Aston Martin recently announced that Adrian Newey’s role within the team will be expanding to include team principal duties starting from 2026.
Alongside his role as Chief Technical Officer, Newey, who is often associated with speed and dominance in Formula One, will be overseeing the operational running of the team track-side.
Newey has been involved in F1 since 1988 therefore making his relationship with the sport almost four decades long. Entering the sport with March/Leyton House in 1988, Newey served as their technical director and created a chassis capable of far more than what was expected of a team of their size.
He managed a two year stint at the team before he was fired although he shortly after joined Williams.
Williams was perhaps the true beginning of not only his designing career but the establishment of his record and reputation within the business. He joined the team, not as technical director as he was at Leyton House, but as technical officer instead.
Establishing himself at the team between 1991 to 1997, Newey designed some of the most iconic cars of this period and helped drivers such as Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve to championship glory.
However, with the highs of this period also came the lows which included Ayrton Senna’s fatal crash in 1994 behind the wheel of the Williams FW16.
During this grave period for Williams, Newey was one of the team personnel who was charged with manslaughter in the death of Senna; however he was later acquitted.
While at Williams, Newey designed cars that won 59 races and achieved 78 pole positions. Finally opening the account of championship titles that he contributed to, Newey’s cars had won five WCC titles and four WDC titles with four different drivers.
By 1996, as Hill and Villeneuve were wrapping up both championships for the team, Newey had already been placed on gardening leave ahead of his imminent move to McLaren.
Looking for advancement that wasn’t possible at Williams, Newey’s next target was another historical name, McLaren. At McLaren, he enjoyed total freedom as he finally became technical director for the second time in his career. Unlike his time at Leyton House where his cars were not expected to amount to much, the expectations were high ahead of his arrival.
Although his impact at the team for the 1997 car was limited, he enjoyed freedom in designing the car for 1998 which would go on to become one of the most dominant in the field.
The MP4/13 was no mean feat of engineering and, driven by Mika Häkkinen, brought a Newey design back to the top of both championship standings.
In 1999, Hakkinen won his second driver’s title by driving the MP4/14 and, although unknown at the time, the final title that Newey would win at McLaren. In the end, Newey won two WCC titles and one WDC title while working at McLaren under the supervision of Ron Dennis.
Like the situation when departing Williams for McLaren, Newey’s departure from McLaren for Red Bull was also touched by controversy.
From 2004 until his eventual departure from the team in 2006, Newey’s strained relationship with Dennis was the subject of much media attention. Despite Dennis insisting that Newey would be with the team until the end of 2006, Red Bull’s announcement overrode Dennis’ reassurances.
In the end, Newey joined Red Bull in 2006 and would remain at the team for 18 years, the longest F1 team tenure of his career. In that time, he became a cornerstone member of the team, just like former team principal Christian Horner and Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko. Collectively, the three men built a team designed around the mantra of breaking records.
Although his time at the team got off to a slow and difficult start, with his early cars characterised by their unpredictability, Newey hit his stride at Red Bull in 2009 with the RB5 .
With the combination of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber driving the RB6, the 2010 season commenced with a dominant display. The season ended with Newey becoming the only designer in F1 to have won WCC titles with three different teams, a feat yet to be achieved by anyone else.
After dominant runs between 2010 to 2014, having taken four consecutive WCC and WDC titles with Vettel, Red Bull found themselves overwhelmed by the speed and subsequent success of Mercedes. Battling for the coveted title without success until 2021, Max Verstappen’s maiden championship title finally brought the team back into contention.
With a new set of regulations in 2022, Newey’s designs took the grid by storm as they repeated their dominance from 2010 to 2014. 2023 in particular, with the RB19, was his biggest showing of speed and skill as the car went on to be the most dominant in F1’s history.
In 2024, it was announced that Newey would leave Red Bull’s F1 venture in favour of developing the hypercar project. Shortly after that, Aston Martin announced that Newey would be joining the team as shareholder and managing technical partner in March 2025 to prepare for the new 2026 regulations.
With over half the grid’s team principals hailing from an engineering or design background in 2026, the battle for speed will play out in the highest position in F1.
For Newey, who has brought success and speed wherever he has gone, the stakes could not be any higher in this new chapter. As an Aston Martin shareholder, he will be hoping that his collaboration with the Silverstone outfit will yield the same success as his previous projects.
Having designed for some of the biggest names on the grid and worked with some of the most successful drivers of all time, Newey will bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the helm of the Aston Martin ship.
Only time will tell if said experience and knowledge will be enough to get them over the line ahead of everyone else.
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