In the summer of 2023, bulldozers moved onto a small plot of land across the road from Silverstone circuit and began demolishing a building that had stood, in one patched-together form or another, since 1991.
It wasn’t a big building – barely 315 square metres, dwarfed by the 60,000 square metres of Mercedes‘ Brackley operation or Red Bull‘s Milton Keynes campus.
Doorways had been cut into its walls over the decades to let ever-larger equipment through. It had grown, as one long-serving engineer at the site would later put it, “very organic” in its expansion, to the point of becoming close to dysfunctional.
That building was the Jordan team factory, and when it came down to make way for Aston Martin‘s £200 million Racing Technical Campus, it looked for all the world like the final, physical closing of a chapter that had already run through five other identities on the way to Aston Martin.
The team’s tech chief Adrian Newey has now made clear is that the walls coming down did not mean everything inside them came down too, and that, he claims, is partly behind Aston Martin‘s disastrous start to the 2026 Formula 1 season.
The factory may have ceased to exist in 2023; what remained were the ways of working built up inside it – project management habits, correlation processes, physics tools – carried over largely intact from one identity to the next because there was never the time or budget to start again.
Untangling that, more than any single aerodynamic package, is the job Aston Martin has actually been doing this year.
Five rebrands, one building
The facts of the original factory’s lineage have been well established over the years, if rarely dwelt upon.
Jordan Grand Prix arrived at Silverstone for its Formula 1 debut in 1991, built by Eddie Jordan from his F3000 operation, and stayed there through 250 grands prix, four wins and a third place championship finish in 1999.
The original factory was where Jordan built its debut F1 car
Grand Prix Photo
When Jordan sold up in 2005, the site did not move, it simply changed its sign.
Five ownership changes, four constructor identities beyond the original, and one continuous piece of ground.
For most of that history, the building itself was the same one Jordan had built.
It absorbed new machine shops, new composites facilities, new fabrication teams, extending and adapting rather than starting again, because starting again was never something any of those owners, operating on Jordan-sized or Force India-sized budgets, could afford to do.
Not until Lawrence Stroll‘s investment made a clean-sheet campus possible did the site actually get rebuilt from the ground up.
The romance of scraping by
Jordan itself is the identity most fondly remembered of all, and with good reason: four wins, a 1999 season that yielded third in the constructors’ championship, and a reputation as the team that could beat the establishment on a fraction of its budget.
Those results, on the same patched-together infrastructure Newey now talks about, arguably represent the sharpest overperformance the site has ever produced – more race wins than any of the identities that followed it, Force India included.
Force India, which held the site for a decade, never matched that win tally, but it built its own version of the same reputation: a team that punched far above its budget, taking a pole position at Spa in 2009, six podium finishes, and back-to-back fourth-place constructors’ finishes in 2016 and 2017 against teams spending multiples of its budget.
Both eras were, in their own way, built on the improvisational culture Newey now identifies as part of the problem: making do, patching rather than replacing, squeezing performance out of whatever tools and processes were already on hand because there was no alternative – and doing it well enough, for long enough, that the workaround became the identity.
It is a culture that made sense under Jordan’s and then Vijay Mallya’s budgets of necessity.
Not fit for purpose
That obviously stops making sense once a team is being backed to genuinely fight for a championship, and 2026, with its wholesale regulation reset, appears to be the kind of moment that exposes the gap between the two.
“We were relying on tools and processes that had been patched and bodged for years,” Newey said in an interview published this week on Aston Martin’s website.
“You could trace some of them right back to the very early days of the Jordan team that was based here in Silverstone, long before Aston Martin returned to the grid.
Newey admits the old factory wasn’t fit for purpose
Grand Prix Photo
“The result was a very frustrating car build. Parts weren’t being ordered at the right time – not because people weren’t doing their jobs, but because the underlying system was failing them.”
A system that is patch-on-patch, Newey said, eventually “stops being fit for purpose.”
He went further still, separating out project management software from something more fundamental – “the core physics tools themselves” – meaning even the simulation and correlation tools used to design the AMR26 were part of the same inherited, decades-deep patchwork.
A building rebuilt; a system that wasn’t
This is where the physical history of the site actually matters, rather than being a piece of trivia to hang Newey’s quotes on.
Aston Martin solved the building problem in 2023, but it didn’t, on Newey’s account, solve the systems problem at the same time, and the two were never the same job.
A new factory with a new wind tunnel doesn’t automatically produce new project management tools, new physics correlation software, or new production workflows.
Those had to be inherited, wholesale, into the shiny new campus, patches and all, and it took the shock of a full regulation reset – and a car that came in overweight and aerodynamically short – to force the issue.
“Historically, at this team, there hasn’t been enough investment in engineering simulation tools – not just project management systems, but the core physics tools themselves,” Newey said.
The new Aston Martin campus
Aston Martin
“We’re putting that investment in now, but you don’t rewrite and validate those tools overnight. Correlating them properly with the real car takes time.
“At the moment, they’re improving, but the real gains from that work will come later in the year.”
Newey describes that reckoning now underway: simulation tools being rewritten and revalidated, more components brought in-house (gearbox casings, floor patterns, parts that used to be outsourced), an organisation, in his words, learning to “operate as one cohesive unit” for the first time.
None of it will show up as gains overnight – he is explicit that the real benefit lands later in the year, well after the car upgrade that has drawn most of the attention.
“Timing was a huge part of it, but not the only part,” Newey said of Aston’s problems with its current car. “We’ve got a very talented group of people, but as an organisation we weren’t yet working together as well as you would like and operating as one cohesive unit. Expectations were sky‑high, but the reality of where we were didn’t match that.
“On the chassis side, we’re quite a long way overweight,” he admitted. ” Some of that comes from integrating the power unit and dealing with vibration issues we’ve had to work through with Honda, but we also didn’t do as good a job as we should have on our side at saving weight.
“When you design in a rush, weight is the first thing that suffers because you don’t have the time to thoroughly optimise everything.
“Aerodynamically, we also took a bold direction – which was largely pushed by me – without the luxury of exploring multiple concepts in depth because time was against us.
Aston has been miles away from the front-running teams
Grand Prix Photo
“I wouldn’t say the direction we’ve taken is fundamentally wrong, but it has thrown up challenges we didn’t anticipate.”
The Hungary gamble
The result of that variety of problems has been the most underwhelming first part of the season anyone could have imagined.
Fernando Alonso has scored a single point in eight races, and Aston has often even been outperformed by F1’s new team, Cadillac.
Following its disastrous first half of the season, Newey has taken the gamble to discard smaller updates every weekend and instead deliver a ‘B-spec’ car right before the summer break.
Newey admitted the strategy was a conscious, uncomfortable call.
“It was a painful decision,” he said, adding that watching rivals add performance race by race while Aston effectively stood still made “each weekend feel more painful than the last.”
He frames it as an investment rather than a setback; a trying period the team “probably needs to go through” to emerge stronger, with a meaningful step forward promised for the second half of 2026 and a larger one for next year.
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The package itself, due on both cars in Hungary, is not a clean-sheet car: chassis and gearbox architecture stay fundamentally the same, and the front suspension is untouched.
But weight has been stripped from both chassis and gearbox, serious enough to require re-homologating and crash-testing the forward chassis, alongside a new nose, substantially revised aerodynamic surfaces and a slightly reworked rear suspension.
The stated aim is to get the car close to the weight limit, a tacit admission of how much of the AMR26’s early-season deficit has been mass rather than aerodynamics or power unit alone.
Read against the systems’ story, the Hungary package looks less like an isolated fix and more like the first visible output of the rebuild Newey has been describing underneath it – new tools and processes finally producing a car update rather than another patch.
There is something poignant, if not exactly comfortable, in the idea that a team built around a two-time world champion, a championship-calibre car designer, and a £200 million campus is still, in 2026, being shaped by decisions made in a modest Silverstone factory more than three decades ago.
