Due to Red Bull "blocking" Adrian Newey's "tools", plus the nature of the F1 2026 rules, he will be behind the curve at Aston Martin.
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Due to Red Bull “blocking” Adrian Newey’s “tools” through gardening leave, plus the nature of the F1 2026 regulations, the F1 design guru admits he will be behind the curve at Aston Martin.
Newey is set to start Aston Martin life from 2 March, two months after teams are allowed to begin work on the huge regulatory reset coming for F1 2026, when new chassis and power unit rules are introduced.
With Aston Martin taking over use of the Honda power unit from Red Bull in 2026, the Silverstone squad will look to make its way towards F1 title glory with Newey focused on this upcoming new ruleset. However, he is battling against the odds.
While appearing on the
Autocar podcast, it was put to Newey that while he has been on a period of soft gardening leave since May after announcing his Red Bull exit, with the RB17 hypercar his final focus, Red Bull cannot stop him thinking of innovations that will benefit his future employer Aston Martin.
He replied: “No, they can’t, but they’ve blocked my tools.
“So obviously, Aston wants to do the best job they can in ’25, but my main kind of focus will be the ’26 regulations and this big change, because I start on 2 March. The aero rules come out, I think, 1 January, or might be the second, whatever the working day is.
“So I’ll already be kind of two months behind the curve. But in truth, of course, it’s more than that, because not only will I be behind on the looking at those regulations compared to when they’ve come out… With the way the regulations have gone, you really need to be in front of a CAD [computer-aided design] system as well, to be able to understand all the boxes and so forth. They’re so prescribed.