Adrian Newey’s new role… we didn’t see this coming!

Adrian Newey a team boss? That really was not on anyone’s bingo card. Ever. But it came to pass on the eve of the Qatar Grand Prix as Aston Martin announced that team CEO Andy Cowell was stepping away from the team principal role and technical chief Newey was taking it up.

This followed reported disagreements between Newey and Cowell behind the scenes as the empowerment of their roles overlapped. Newey has the surface temperament of a quiet, reflective, gentle artist but beneath that is bubbling a cauldron of competitive desire. It’s what has driven him to be arguably the greatest technical maestro the sport has ever seen. He’s certainly the most enduring, his designs having dominated over four decades, the teams he’s joined invariably becoming the standard setters. His creative abilities are not just aerodynamic but have a global picture of the whole car-driver performance. He is better than anyone at instantly intuiting what the critical paths limiting further performance are of any rule set, and therefore of where to target the technical team’s energy. He might set an apparently impossible target and has little patience for any ‘that can’t be done’ response when he knows that it can be. ‘Come back when you’ve done it’ might be the message, quietly delivered but absolutely unambiguous in meaning.

“Somewhere along the line there’s been a refusal to compromise”

Cowell, besides being the greatest engine designer of his generation earlier in his career, is a great team leader, someone who understands exactly how to get a group of gifted people aligned and working towards his goals with minimal energy loss – as if he was designing an engine, minimising the mechanical and frictional losses. He’s a great communicator but his tone is no-nonsense, more strident than Newey’s. Lines of communication and targets are clear and he becomes – as he phrased it – “proper grumpy” when there is any blurring of those lines. Because that’s where the frictional losses interfere with the programme.

Newey is intolerant of management systems, especially when they get in the way of achieving what he feels needs to be done technically. It’s what finally drove him out of McLaren a couple of decades ago. One of Christian Horner’s great achievements at Red Bull was in keeping Adrian happy and not letting any of that structure get in the way of what he wanted to do creatively. With the technical department structured around him, Newey was free to come and go as he pleased, to have as much or as little involvement as he chose to once he’d set it on a course.

However, the respective requirements of Cowell and Newey – each hard-headed and uncompromisingly competitive despite their very different personalities – at Aston have apparently clashed. Somewhere along the line there’s been a refusal to compromise – and this is the outcome. It has been explained away in PR terms as them having “agreed to divide their responsibilities in order to focus on their individual strengths and expertise, ensuring organisational efficiency”. Cowell has been given the new title of chief strategy officer, “using his unique experience to help optimise the technical partnership between the Team, Honda, Aramco and Valvoline”. Quite what that involves is not clear. It would not be a total surprise if he quietly left the team a few months hence. It would be Aston’s loss, especially since he would surely be snapped up by a rival.

Cowell and Newey embody contrasting approaches to technical leadership: the more modern manager who optimises the system; and the traditional inspirational creative leader who pulls everyone along in their wake. Newey has many times stated he has no desire ever to be a manager. Cowell proved hugely successful in that role at Ilmor and subsequently Mercedes HPE.

The situation has been read by some as just a holding pattern until Christian Horner’s Red Bull gardening leave expires in April. From what we understand, that is not the intention of either Aston or Horner. The split is not a plan but the outcome of a disagreement, one for which owner Lawrence Stroll has had to find a solution. It’s easy to feel sympathy for the boss as he’s gone about recruiting two of the biggest F1 brains in his quest to take his team to the top – and they’ve proved incompatible.

Meanwhile, Newey now no longer has whatever barrier he felt Cowell represented and can be free to structure things however he wants. But a team principal traditionally represents the team in discussions with the FIA about regulations, with FOM about money, with sponsors and media. These are not responsibilities Adrian will relish. They will take away time, energy and focus from his technical role, give him less opportunity to go into what he has described as a ‘design trance’ as he creates.

One can’t help feeling that this is a net loss for the team.

Paddock talk

“I just won it my way” 
New world champion Lando Norris channels Frank Sinatra with a typically honest assessment of his victory…

“We pushed each other through the last three years. He’s a deserving champion”
Oscar Piastri is all-praise for his team-mate

“They had an incredible season, so it’s important that they enjoy it”
Max Verstappen reacts to McLaren’s double title but do we detect an ominous note in there too? 

“An unbearable amount of anger and rage”
Lewis Hamilton sums up his feelings after ending his first F1 season with Ferrari by being knocked out of qualifying in the first session at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix