Aston Martin team boss Andy Cowell has revealed insights into his collaboration with top designer Adrian Newey. The Brit joined the racing team last March and was present in the Aston Martin garage for the first time during a Grand Prix weekend at the Monaco GP. Cowell now reveals how Newey tries to motivate the team through provocation: ‘Adrian challenges us’.
Adrian Newey has been working with Aston Martin for a few months now and has drawn his first conclusions about the British racing team. The top designer recently warned his new team that there is a lack of correlation between the simulator and on-track performance. Newey suspects that it will take at least two years for Aston Martin to solve this problem.
However, team boss Andy Cowell, and the entire design team of the British racing team, are determined to prove Newey wrong. “Everything we do can and must be better,” Cowell agrees with Newey, in the James Allen on F1 podcast. “Adrian thinks the same. The great thing about Adrian is that he knows the level we need to reach. So he sets the bar high. I set the bar high within the organization. And then it’s about how quickly we can get there.”
According to the British team boss, Newey is trying to motivate Aston Martin with his provocations. “Adrian is challenging us. He says it takes everyone two years to achieve that (a good correlation between simulator and track). And everyone in the factory I’ve spoken to, and who works on the design team, says: ‘Well, we’ll show him! We’ll make it months instead of years’.”
Open Communication
Newey has been working at Aston Martin for two months now. According to Cowell, the collaboration with the former Red Bull designer is going excellently. “Adrian is not interested in managing people, business organization, or the way to stitch everything together so that we are all focused on the race car,” Cowell explains about the top designer’s way of working. “Adrian is focused on the design of the race car, the architecture, and the detailed considerations. He has been in the industry for a long time, just like me, and we know our strengths and weaknesses. I think the strength of both of us is that we can just talk openly with each other.”
