Aston Martin boss Andy Cowell has explained the thorough measures being implemented to avoid the team slipping into the development “chaos” it endured during the 2024 Formula 1 campaign.
2024 saw Aston Martin chopping and changing floors from weekend to weekend in a desperate bid to unlock more performance from an AMR24 machine that was severely limited.
Throughout last year, Aston Martin repeatedly failed to implement upgrades successfully.
After a difficult start to 2025, Cowell revealed to select media, including Motorsport Week in Miami, that upgrades are in the pipeline, but that they must be introduced methodically to avoid a repeat of the issues suffered last season.
“There is work ongoing to bring some updated parts to the track,” the Aston Martin CEO and Team Principal said.
“We are making sure that we’ve got good confidence in those parts before we bring them to the circuit. And we’re also looking carefully at when we bring parts to the circuit, how do we quantify them, that it is better.
“Last year from event to event we were changing floor specs and in-event we were changing floor specs.
“We don’t want that level of chaos at the circuit. We want a carefully considered introduction plan with some great instrumentation on the car and an engineer allocated to look at it, giving us the thumbs up.
“Making sure that the tool that we’re using is precise enough to give us that thumbs up. Because otherwise we’re just guessing and that’s not a great way to do engineering.”
Aston Martin conducting analysis after underwhelming F1 effort in Jeddah
Aston Martin failed to score a point across the triple header of Japan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
In Bahrain, its deficiencies could be attributed to the low-speed cornering weakness inherent in the AMR25, but Jeddah should have mitigated those problems.
Instead, neither Fernando Alonso or Lance Stroll cracked the top-10, with the latter qualifying in 16th place at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit and the former fearing no more points will come Aston Martin’s way for the remainder of the campaign.
“Jeddah showed some interesting characteristics,” Cowell said.
“I think Fernando’s qualifying performance in Jeddah [13th] was impressive.
“He was pushing exceptionally hard. Both drivers are exceptionally strong.
“I think perhaps that showed that the stability of the car is a little bit better than the year before.
“But at the end of the day, it’s out-and-out performance that matters.
“Jeddah, interesting corner analysis that we’ve been digging into over the last 10 days and looking at aero characteristics and vehicle dynamic characteristics, which will help us going forward,” he concluded.
It’s up to Aston Martin to get on top of its current machine without interfering too much with its 2026 project, which has and will remain the pure focus of Managing Technical Partner Adrian Newey.
In the interim, Cowell confirmed that Newey “will attend the odd race this year” and no doubt he’ll be able to offer some input to help Aston Martin dig itself out of the hole it finds itself in.
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