MPH: Aston Martin's moment of truth. Why F1 masterplan will flourish or flop at Imola
F1
After losing its way last year, Aston Martin's F1 team has been reshaping itself into a force that can fight for world championships. This weekend's Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix is where it must start to deliver, says Mark Hughes
Fernando Alonso has endured a torrid 2025 season so far, but Imola should mark a turning point for the team
An apparently routine bit of car development for Imola this weekend represents an interesting test for the Aston Martin team. As we highlighted here last week, it has averaged around 1.2sec off the pace so far, eighth fastest of the 10 teams. This has come off the back of very disappointing 2024 season during which every development ‘upgrade’ for the car seemed to make it slower. They were still mixing and matching early-season floors with new ones late into the season.
The Imola upgrade – comprising a new floor and top bodywork package – is not suddenly going to catapult Aston to the front. But it is the first physical product from the Cowell-led group and from the new tunnel. Given the performance pattern of the team’s upgrades over the years, this represents a litmus test for the upgraded team with such big ambitions, one which is looking to be fighting for championships in the near future with cars conceived under Adrian Newey.
“We’re trying to make sure that what we measure in the factory is as thorough as we can make it,” says Cowell, who was a foundational member of the blockbusting Mercedes team of the hybrid years, “and the way we test here at the circuit – that third world of aerodynamics of a full-size car and its different stiffness characteristics compared with a wind tunnel model and running on a track with kerbs and bumps and undulations and movement of the car. That’s what we will learn here. It’s trying to be more thorough.”
In situ for a few months now, Cowell has had the chance to assess the team, its facilities and processes, the people and how they work together, and has made changes in line with his own vision of how a top F1 team should be.
Andy Cowell has reshaped Aston Martin — into a team that can fight for the championship next year?
Aston Martin
“It’s the approach you take and the tools you use,” he says. “Both need to be best in class in order to succeed. We’re fortunate that we’re now getting better tools to use and we are reflecting and trying to dig into the detail of why things didn’t work last year. Some of which is direction, some approach. It all comes down to the precision and confidence you’ve got in the number you’re reading. We all live in this digital world where numbers are presented to three decimal places and we believe them. But what’s the error band? We’re trying to look in greater detail at what the error band is in everything we measure. How do you do an experiment where you hope to get a greater confidence of getting a clear answer?
“When you do an experiment I don’t care too much if it’s a positive or a negative. I hate the grey bit in between because that’s when you’ve not thought about the journey you’ve taken.”
Andy Cowell will be the new face of Aston Martin as its F1 team principal. But more significant are the changes he’s been making behind the scenes ahead of Adrian Newey’s arrival, writes Adam Cooper
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Adam Cooper
Without being specifically critical of how things were here previously, Cowell’s explanation for how they are going about achieving their targets pretty much tells you where the shortfalls have been.
“We’ve got some really talented people. How do we get all of us to work well together so that we have ideas that we quickly get full-size parts to the track and with confidence they’ll work? We’re trying to create a racing team that can do that, one which is having innovative ideas and quickly getting them to the track but not rushing and therefore missing the [performance] target. Because that’s what’s important for our future. There is a desire to make sure our innovation machine is more robust – and then we can squeeze the time frame.
“In ’23 and ’24 we started out better than we finished so we need to understand what it is about us – as a team of people with the equipment we’ve got. We need to make the car quicker every single race in the most efficient way. We need to be an awesome innovation machine. That’s what we’re striving to be.”
