Matt Bishop: Why Newey's new F1 team principal title isn't the real story

What curious creatures we are in Formula 1. We spend our professional lives insisting that job titles are mere trifles, that the stopwatch is the only arbiter that counts, and that the cars do not read the business cards of the people who design them; then, when the job title of a major player is changed, we all run around in panicky circles as though someone has shifted our sport’s tectonic plates.

So when Aston Martin announced that Adrian Newey, the most celebrated drawing-board sorcerer in F1 history, would henceforth be addressed as team principal, a sizeable tremor could be felt rolling through the F1 paddock. Why? Because, on the face of it, it was a crazy development, that is why. Or, to put it another way, why would Lawrence Stroll take his extremely highly paid 66-year-old car design genius and diffuse his focus by unnecessarily expanding his responsibilities in a direction in which he has never shown any skill hitherto?

Well, Stroll is cannier than that. So my guess is that Newey’s apparent elevation is less of a new role and more of a judicious repositioning: the marking out of new territory for and by a man who has spent 40 years demonstrating that you can, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks, providing, of course, that the dog in question is a 66-year-old aero messiah whose tricks were better than everyone else’s to begin with. And that is the key: for all the chatter about Newey’s new role, no one who has watched the arc of his extraordinary career could believe for a moment that he will suddenly relax his devotion to his daily worship at the altar of aerodynamic innovation in favour of management speak, motivational huddles, media tartery, or the complex abstractions of corporate and commercial strategies.

He is, after all, the man who has shaped more F1 world championship-winning cars than anyone else in the sport’s history: an artist whose canvases happen to travel at warp speed. He knows better than anyone that the secret of winning in F1 is still the business of successfully conceiving and crafting the car itself. If the team principal title must accompany him into the next phase of his professional reinvention, then so be it, but he will remain what he has always been: the designer in chief, the conceptual compass, and the quiet but determined force of gravity at the centre of every project he touches.

Moreover, ‘team principal’ no longer describes a single, neatly defined role. It used to, of course, in the days when F1’s leaders were charismatic generalists who owned at least some of their teams – your Ron Dennises, your Frank Williamses, your Colin Chapmans, even your Enzo Ferraris – and if a technical director lurked behind them to perform the design alchemy, he was very much a boffin beavering away behind closed doors. Now the trend has reversed. The modern team principal, more often than not, is an engineer by heritage and by habit.

At McLaren, the clever but soft-spoken Andrea Stella arrived with a resumé bristling with engineering credentials. James Vowles at Williams brought with him years of Mercedes engineering know-how, delivered with the unmistakable air of a man who had spent much of his life staring at data traces. Ayao Komatsu of Haas, too, is an engineer by training and temperament, quietly reorganising that sturdy little team with the calm precision of a man who understands both the machinery and the men and women who tend it.

Moreover, modern team principals – especially in the new epoch of big-team gigantism – do not operate as lone rangers. They build constellations around themselves: little solar systems of complementary expertise. McLaren provides the archetype: Andrea Stella as the engineering lodestar, Zak Brown as the commercial crusader, each occupying his own hemisphere of influence, neither venturing too far into the other’s domain without diplomatic notice. Audi and Cadillac, those two new super-teams preparing to march into F1 in 2026, have already embraced the same model. Audi has handed the keys not to one man but to two: Mattia Binotto, the bookish technocrat, and Jonathan Wheatley, the experienced and ambitious mechanic made very good. Cadillac, too, will ride into battle with Dan Towriss and Graeme Lowdon sharing the high seat. In such brave new worlds, the team principal is primus inter pares – first among equals, or at least joint first – supported by a cadre of specialists whose jobs are to fill in the troughs between his peaks and elevate the enterprise to something greater than its constituent talents.

Call him team principal if you like… It hardly matters.

Aston Martin, being a team of both ambition and resource, has now adopted that model with gusto. Newey may sit at the apex of the pyramid, but the supporting beams have been carefully chosen and amply reinforced. Andy Cowell, the no-nonsense engineering manager who helped build the V6 turbo-hybrid era into a Merc dominion, has already been ushered in as a central pillar of the project. Mike Krack, too, remains in place – steady, dependable, and unbeholden to the sharp-elbowed politics that can sometimes swirl around senior technical hires. And if the rumour mill chuntering away on the web is even half right, more senior lieutenants may yet be recruited to flank Newey in the coming months. Mattia Binotto? Perhaps. Andreas Seidl? Possibly. Stroll loves collecting expensive trinkets in human form.

One candidate who will almost certainly not be joining them is Christian Horner. Relations between Horner and Newey had grown sufficiently strained during their late-stage Red Bull cohabitation to render any reunion unlikely – although I am told that they are no longer quite as angry with each other as they once were. Add to that the even more combustible dynamic between Horner and Jos Verstappen – whose quarrels with his son’s erstwhile team boss occasionally made the duels between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier seem like a pair of Jacobean bards trading rhymed couplets – and the idea collapses under its own absurdity. Furthermore, do not forget: Stroll is a big man with big ideas, and his grand plan may well include, sooner or later, luring Max Verstappen into his orbit. Hiring Horner, whose relationship with the Verstappen camp frayed visibly and damagingly, would place a wholly unnecessary potential obstacle between Stroll and the best driver in the world. Lawrence is no novice in the cut-throat world of international wheeler-dealing; he can spot an impediment when he sees one.

So what does Newey’s job title change really mean? What will his Aston Martin look like, in spirit if not yet in carbon fibre? Here we approach the heart of the matter. Whatever his job title, Newey will be the de facto head honcho, second only to Stroll, who – for all his sartorial swagger and rag-trade polish, and notwithstanding his track record of micro-managing previous Aston Martin seniors – surely has the good sense to keep a feather-light touch when a great virtuoso is at work. Stroll will sign the cheques, yes; he will approve the hires, yes; but he will also know when to step back and let genius unfurl.

Cowell and Krack – and whoever else may join them – will assist. That is what senior management in F1 increasingly looks like: a set of concentric circles radiating outwards from a central force, which may be applied by one key figure or sometimes more than one. In Aston Martin’s case, that central force is Newey. There will be diplomacy, consultation, and the occasional disagreement, of course, for F1 success is built on productive tension among stubbornly brilliant people. But in the final reckoning it will be Newey’s vision that shapes the car and the team, just as surely as a river shapes the valley through which it flows.

Stroll, who has not become a multi-billionaire by being cavalier with his investments, understands precisely what he has acquired. He has therefore given Newey exactly what he wanted: a huge salary, share options, freedom, authority, insulation from political turbulence, and, critically, the right lieutenants. He will thereby permit him to operate at full creative stretch. And if Newey, now in the sunset-but-still-scorching phase of his career, has one more all-conquering F1 design in him – and there is no reason to doubt that he has – then Aston Martin’s path to the front becomes not only possible but also plausible. Stroll’s long-held ambition of transforming his team from a midfield outfit into a world championship powerhouse could, at last, drift into the realm of the real.

And which driver, or drivers, will do the winning, if there is winning to be done? Fernando Alonso will turn 45 next year; brilliant though he has always been, he cannot go on for very much longer. Lance Stroll is talented, but few pundits have ever tipped him as a future F1 world champion. Those truths lead us inexorably to Verstappen, the glittering jewel in the crown that is Stroll’s long game. To bring Verstappen to Silverstone – a project that once looked like a rich man’s fancy but now feels more like a decent bet – Aston Martin needs more than money. It needs to be a project that a multiple F1 world champion would feel compelled to join not out of desperation, but desire. Above all, therefore, it needs a winning car, and no one in F1 is better equipped to conjure such a machine than Newey.