Adrian Newey has been hard at work for almost a year designing Aston Martin’s 2026 F1 car.

Adrian Newey has led Aston Martin’s 2026 F1 car design efforts (Image: Getty)

Legendary Formula 1 designer Adrian Newey is said to have left a key decision about the 2026 Aston Martin car “as late as possible” ahead of the upcoming campaign. It is the first car that the 67-year-old has conceived for the team, having decided to join the project in September 2024 following his departure from Red Bull.

At his previous employer, Newey enjoyed remarkable success, designing eight drivers’ championship-winning cars for Red Bull which also secured six constructors’ titles. Previously, he had also brought championship glory to Williams and McLaren, making him the only designer in F1 history to have won the teams’ title with three different teams.

He hopes to add a fourth to the list now that he is working in Aston Martin’s state-of-the-art Silverstone base. The rules reset for this upcoming 2026 season has provided the ideal opportunity for Newey to work his magic and deliver a car which could, if all goes well, put double world champion Fernando Alonso back in contention for the title again.

But it is far from that simple for any team up and down the grid, given the scale of the regulation changes when it comes to both engine and aerodynamic design. No-one yet knows where they will stand relative to their rivals on track and, even for a vastly experienced and decorated designer like Newey, it is far from obvious which is the correct development path to follow.

Aston Martin hope to build a race-winning car for Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll in 2026 (Image: Getty)

The suspension on the new car is said to have been a topic to which Newey has given much deliberation. According to Auto Racer, Newey and his colleagues left a final decision over which type of suspension system to use on the 2026 car until the last possible moment, and it is not yet known which style they landed upon.

According to the report, it would therefore “not be surprising” if Aston Martin fail to turn up to the first race of the season, the Australian Grand Prix on the first weekend of March, with a “fully optimised” car. Such an eventuality would, though, leave the team with more lap time to be found through its car development over the course of the season and beyond in this new era for F1.

Most teams were running with push-rod suspensions by the end of the last regulations cycle, with Ferrari and their customer team Haas the late hold-outs who stuck with a pull-rod design. Defending the decision to not follow the trend, in early 2024, the Scuderia’s then-technical director Enrico Cardile said he saw no performance advantage to be gained through changing.

Cardile is now chief technical officer at Aston Martin, leading the car design an engineering departments along with Newey. In his absence, Ferrari are believed to have gone with a push-rod approach for their first stab at the new regulations, with Haas following suit as a result of their technical arrangement with the Scuderia.