Fernando Alonso is no stranger to high-speed challenges, but even he admits that working with Aston Martin’s new design maestro, Adrian Newey, is like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while driving at 200 mph.
In an interview published this week on the Aston Martin F1 website, the F1 veteran spilled the beans on what it’s like to collaborate with the legendary designer, whose 26 F1 titles’ worth of engineering acumen are now fueling Aston Martin’s ambitions for the 2026 regulations reset.
While Alonso is obviously thrilled to have Newey on board, he admits there’s just one small complication: Newey’s brain seems to operate on another frequency entirely.
“Yeah, he’s an incredible person, the best designer in the history of our sport, and everyone in the team is learning a lot from him,” Alonso said of Newey, who joined Team Silverstone earlier this year after nearly two decades with Red Bull Racing.
A Mental Marathon with Newey’s Genius
Newey has a knack for sniffing out performance-enhancing loopholes in any rulebook. His ideas, however, come with a catch: they’re not exactly easy to wrap your head around. Even a casual chat with the Briton can feel like sitting in on a physics lecture.
“Everything Adrian does, you try to understand why he is doing that, why he chose that direction, or why he’s answering in that way, because there is always something to learn from him,” Alonso explained.
“Even from a simple answer that he can give to you in response to a question, that simple answer can be so clear to him, but why is it not for others?
“There are moments when, to be able to understand him, you need to use all your brain capacity. Even if Adrian only uses five per cent, for us, for normal people, we need to use much more.”
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If Newey’s brain really runs on just five percent of its bandwidth, the rest of us may need an upgrade – or at least a bigger hard drive.
To drive the point home, when it was suggested to Alonso that Newey was like a chess grandmaster, always thinking several moves ahead, the Spaniard didn’t hesitate.
“Yeah, that’s actually a very good example. You know, I think he could be a very good chess player,” he acknowledged.
Plotting the 2026 Revolution
Aston Martin is gearing up for a seismic shift in 2026, with team owner Lawrence Stroll assembling a dream team to chase glory.
Alongside Alonso’s grit and a juicy works Honda deal, Newey’s arrival is the cherry on top. The squad is already buzzing with ideas for the new regulations, and Alonso has been dipping his toes into Newey’s creative process – though it’s more like wading into a mental deep end.
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“At the moment, our meetings have been very informal and general about the rules,” he explained. “We’ve not gone into deep details on something.
“Obviously, he’s curious to know our feelings and our understanding of things. You know, maybe he’s going in one direction and he wants to just tell us how that might impact our way of driving the car, and ask if we had any experience of that in the past and these kinds of things.”
For now, Newey’s holed up in his design lair, scribbling and drawing away like a mad scientist.
“He’s always in his room, at his drawing board and just focused on delivering results,” Alonso added. “We will go into more details when the car is in a more developed phase.”
Eyes on the Prize, Brakes on Expectations
Alonso is cautiously optimistic about what’s coming, and therefore keeping his excitement in check – although barely. The 44-year-old, still chasing that elusive third world title, knows the real test comes when rubber meets the road.
“I’m pretty excited about it. But from the driver’s point of view, we have to wait to see how the car feels. We’ve done a little bit of testing on the simulator, but no simulator can be 100 per cent realistic,” he said.
“We need to wait until January to jump in the car for the first time to discover how it will really feel: how the next generation of cars will behave in the corners, under braking, attacking the high-speed, the low-speed – all these detailed feelings are only possible when you drive the car.
“I’m very curious to find out what it will really be like.”
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With Newey’s mind firing several moves ahead and Alonso’s hunger for a third world title still burning bright, Aston Martin looks to have assembled one of the sport’s most intriguing pairings.
Just don’t ask Alonso to explain Newey’s thought process without a strong coffee and maybe a whiteboard.
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