The impact of Adrian Newey’s arrival at Aston Martin was clear when he joined them at last weekend’s race, says Fernando Alonso.

The team’s star technical signing made his first appearance at a race weekend for them in Monaco. Alonso, who is working with the design ace for the first time in his career, said he brought valuable insight into how they can become more competitive.

“It was fantastic the way he sees things on the car, even statically on the pit lane or at the grid, also in the garage, spotting some things that we could have done better or [can] do better in the future,” said Alonso.

Newey also had an immediate impact on their meetings during the event. “His presence in the meeting room is always special. Not intimidating, but I think the level of the team was higher thanks to his presence because everyone was more focused, more into the details of the car.

“Every word [from] people that were talking in the meeting, they know that they cannot say anything too far from truth because he will spot it. So I think that was great to witness and I hope next year with more races that he will come we will keep learning from him and getting better as a team.”

During the event Newey revealed to media that the team’s new wind tunnel and simulation equipment is not yet working as intended. He said it will take up to two years to correct the correlation between their simulation data and the real world.

Aston Martin CEO Andy Cowell downplayed that claim and Alonso also said it will not take that long to put right. “All simulators will have some kind of correlation issues to the real car,” he said.

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“I don’t think that any team has a perfect simulator that you can trust 100% because the car on the real track and the real life is very dynamic and it keeps changing always corner to corner and session to session. There are not two laps in the weekend that are exactly the same because of the wind, because of the temperature, because of the traffic in front, all these kinds of things. So when you try to replicate that on a simulator in a consistent and perfect environment, I think it’s very different.

“But I think we’ll take less than two years to fix our simulator. It’s not new, maybe it’s the first time that Adrian said in Monaco that in the interview, but rest assured that drivers we’ve mentioned it a couple of times already.”

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