Lance Stroll, Aston Martin, Circuit de Catalunya, 2026

Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey says he has produced a more ambitious design than the team has previously attempted.

The AMR26 is the first car the team has produced since Newey joined them. He was originally appointed as managing technical partner and took on the role of team principal at the end of last year.

The new car caused a stir when it appeared for the first time in pre-season testing last week. The AMR26 is noticeably slimmer in places than rival designs. Newey acknowledged the design is “much more tightly packaged than I believe has been attempted at Aston Martin” previously.

“This has required a very close working relationship with the mechanical designers to achieve the aerodynamic shapes we wanted,” said Newey. “But I have to say that all the mechanical designers here have really embraced that philosophy. It hasn’t made their life easy, quite the opposite, but they’ve really risen to the challenge.”

Every other team bar Williams ran its new car for the 2026 season before the new Aston Martin appeared on the fourth day of last week’s test. Newey said the team was rushing to complete the car in time for the first test of the season.

“The reality is that we didn’t get a model of the ’26 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April, whereas most, if not all of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year,” he explained.

“That put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle. The car only came together at the last minute, which is why we were fighting to make it to the Barcelona Shakedown [test].”

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