Newey: A classic case – everything is going wrong.

      Adrian Newey, in an interview with the Aston Martin F1 press service, returned to the painful topic – he explained what the team's problems are related to this season. As always in Formula 1, it is about a whole complex of reasons.

      The famous racing designer joined this team in March last year, and the AMR26 became the first car created in Silverstone under his leadership, but it quickly became clear that the chassis suffers from a whole range of shortcomings, partly due to far from optimal integration with the new Honda power unit.

      The Japanese engine manufacturers also faced many difficulties, and all this led to frequent technical failures. Of course, Newey and his specialists are working intensively on an upgraded version of the chassis, but it will only be presented at the end of next month.

      Adrian Newey: "From the very start of the season, we found ourselves in a position of being behind, both due to the chassis and the power unit. Now we understand that we probably expected too much from ourselves – and, of course, one must never forget that we are competing with teams of very high level.

      We only seriously started working on the 2026 car in mid-March 2025, and we did not begin testing the chassis model in the wind tunnel until mid-April. At that point, we were already several months behind our competitors, which is a huge gap.

      Speaking of the chassis, it turned out to be much heavier than it should be. This is partly due to the integration of the power unit and the need to eliminate vibration issues, which we worked on together with Honda, but we also did not handle the task of reducing the weight of the AMR26 very well.

      When the development of the chassis has to be done in a hurry, it primarily affects its weight, because you simply do not have time to optimize everything thoroughly. In terms of aerodynamics, we also preferred to act boldly – primarily I chose this direction, but we did not have the opportunity to compare different concepts in detail, because time was working against us.

      I do not want to say that the direction we chose was fundamentally wrong, but we encountered a number of unforeseen difficulties. The very first stage of the season, held in Melbourne, became a kind of wake-up call. Due to various problems related to the power unit, we were only able to test our car for the first time during the third practice before the Australian Grand Prix.

      Before that, during the initial testing in Barcelona and at two winter tests in Bahrain, we spent too much time in the garage, simply trying to achieve normal operation of the power unit in conjunction with the chassis and gearbox.

      There is an English saying that usually rain does not just drizzle, but immediately turns into a real downpour. What is happening to us is just such a classic case: it seems that everything that can go wrong is going wrong."