Adrian Newey overhauled Honda’s approach after joining Aston Martin

Aston Martin’s 2026 Formula 1 project has been thrown into turmoil following Adrian Newey’s arrival last March, with Honda revealing that the design legend’s demands forced a wholesale revision of its power-unit programme just months before the season opener.

Satoshi Tsunoda, head of Honda’s F1 engine project, told Autosport Web that “almost everything” surrounding the power unit’s installation has been re-engineered since Newey began work at Silverstone. While the core engine architecture remains intact, Tsunoda confirmed that peripheral components, mounting points and cooling layouts have been repeatedly redrawn to satisfy the aerodynamicist’s vision.

“Newey asked us: ‘Can’t you do it this way?’ And we were running out of time,” Tsunoda said, underscoring the compressed timetable that has left both Honda and Aston Martin scrambling.

The upheaval has already manifested on track. Pre-season testing exposed both a lack of mileage and a clear top-speed deficit on the AMR26, issues Honda attributes to the late integration of Newey’s packaging requirements. Compounding matters, the aggressive slim-line chassis has generated overheating problems, forcing mechanics to cut additional cooling vents into bodywork that had been sealed only weeks earlier.

Wind-tunnel work was equally delayed. Aston Martin did not begin moving-floor runs until the penultimate day of the Barcelona test, a schedule slip that Newey himself estimates put the team four months behind rival outfits. The car’s belated first laps from the garage came after an overnight build that capped weeks of double and triple shifts for staff in both the UK and Japan.

HRC managing director Ikuo Takeishi, speaking at a press conference in Japan, did not downplay the severity of the situation. “We believe the results of the pre-season tests are extremely serious and severe,” he said, adding that engineers at Honda’s Sakura facility are working around the clock to deliver upgrades before the cars hit the Melbourne grid in seven days.

Former F1 driver turned pundit Martin Brundle labelled Aston Martin’s predicament “dire”, a verdict echoed by insiders who describe a factory operating on minimal sleep as it races to homologate revised parts.

The partnership between Aston Martin and Honda was intended to herald a new era of works-level integration, yet Newey’s uncompromising philosophy—honed across three decades of championship-winning cars—has instead exposed the friction between aesthetic ambition and engineering reality. With the Australian Grand Prix looming, both marques now face a baptism of fire as they attempt to merge redesigned hardware with a car that has barely completed a race-distance simulation.