Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey has revealed his team’s 2026 car started wind tunnel development four months later than its rivals, but that hasn’t stopped the new AMR26 turning heads in testing.
Newey, F1’s most celebrated car designer, joined Aston Martin in March last year, three months after aerodynamic work on the 2026 cars was permitted to begin under the regulations.
In an interview with the team’s website, Newey revealed that the car’s development in Aston Martin’s new state-of-the-art wind tunnel did not start until mid-April, creating a significant deficit to its main rivals.
“The AMR Technology Campus is still evolving, the CoreWeave Wind Tunnel wasn’t on song until April, and I only joined the team last March, so we’ve started from behind, in truth,” he said. “It’s been a very compressed timescale and an extremely busy 10 months.
“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.
“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.”
Aston Martin’s arrival at last week’s shakedown test in Barcelona was delayed until the penultimate day of the test, with the AMR26 completing just 65 laps in total compared to the 502 of Mercedes.
The car immediately drew attention on its track debut, not least because of its extreme suspension mounting points and tightly packed sidepods, leading Mercedes driver George Russell to highlight the Honda-powered car as the most intriguing design so far.
“I think the Aston Martin was probably the most standout in terms of the car design,” Russell, who is the bookmaker’s favourite for the drivers’ title, said.
“I think everybody was looking at that rear suspension and it obviously visually looks very impressive, but it’s not a competition of how sexy it is. It’s a competition of how fast it goes around the track, so people always look towards the fastest car and we’ll find that out in Melbourne.
“Whoever that is, that will be the car that you wish to try and take inspiration from.”
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Newey said the AMR26 has been designed with long-term development in mind, rather than rushing out the most extreme concepts straight away.
“We’ve attempted to build something that we hope will have quite a lot of development potential,” he added. “What you want to try to avoid is a car that comes out quite optimised within its window but lacks a lot of development potential.
“We’ve tried to do the opposite, which is why we’ve really focused on the fundamentals, put our effort into those, knowing that some of the appendages – wings, bodywork, things that can be changed in season – will hopefully have development potential.”
Testing resumes next week in Bahrain ahead of the first race of the 2026 season on March 8 in Melbourne, Australia.
