Martin Brundle suggests Aston Martin’s F1 car may face challenges despite early hype

Former Formula 1 driver and Sky Sports analyst Martin Brundle has discussed the first Adrian Newey-designed Aston Martin as it took to the track during private testing in Barcelona.

Newey joined the Silverstone outfit as managing technical partner in 2025 and will now serve as team principal in 2026, meaning the AMR26 is the first Newey-designed Aston Martin under his complete management. 

"Adrian, his cars tend to be quite homogeneous in their beautiful, sweeping airflow to them, you often see that. There doesn’t appear to be as many bits hanging off his cars as you do see on some others," Brundle told Sky Sports F1.

"It’s a really hard undercut on the sidepod, and we’ve seen different interpretations on sidepods, front wings across the board, unsurprisingly, with such new regulations."

The 2026 season brings in a new set of regulations to the championship. Newey was tasked with interpreting the new ruleset while also adjusting to a new team and reuniting with Honda, having previously worked with the manufacturer at Red Bull. Brundle raised questions about whether the designer has the right people around him and also pointed to potential delays in Honda's power unit project.

"We’ve got to assume Adrian has come up with some good ideas, but does he know enough about the Aston Martin wind tunnel and the digital wind tunnel and will he get correlation? Has he got the right people around him to interpret his brilliance?" the former driver added.

"That’s a tall order straight out of the box, actually. Adrian was saying to me that Honda are having to play catch-up because they were leaving and then they came back in. So there’s some question marks there.

Adrian Newey, Managing Technical Partner of Aston Martin F1 Team

Photo by: Jayce Illman / Getty Images

"We’ll have to wait and see, but you just know Adrian will have a vision of how to maximise these regulations. Let’s hope he’s done it and let’s hope that car just flies.

"He’s also legendary for not wanting to sign things off, so when the car was late, it didn’t surprise me at all, to be honest, because Adrian will push that, and he always has done, to the absolute limit because he wants the maximum time of development on those pieces and understanding.

"He doesn’t have that control function of a Christian Horner, or a Patrick Head, or whatever these days. He’s in charge of all of that, but if it absolutely takes off, then as ever, you can say he got it absolutely right. He’s waited until the last minute before having to commit.

"We’ll see - we don’t know - but I’m going to assume that car will be pretty handy through the year."