Stroll's ambition led Newey to take on Aston Martin challenge

SILVERSTONE, England — Billionaire Lawrence Stroll described signing Adrian Newey to lead the technical department of his Formula One team as the “bargain” of his 40-year business career.

It’s rare in any walk of life that an individual being paid up to a reported £30 million a year can be considered a bargain, but that’s how highly the Aston Martin owner values Newey’s talent.

It’s also rare that the signing of an engineer would result in a packed news conference two days before a grand prix, but Newey, 65, is no ordinary F1 engineer. Regularly described as a “design genius,” he not only brings a proven record of success (with 12 constructors’ titles and 13 drivers’ titles to his name) but also that most-prized attribute in a Formula One design office: the ability to consistently make race cars faster in new and interesting ways.

As part of the deal, Newey will become a shareholder in the Aston Martin F1 team, another rarity for an engineer in the sport, and hold the job title of managing technical partner.

“We intend to be around here a very long time together,” Stroll said on Tuesday. “[His contract] is relatively inexpensive for everything Adrian brings to the partnership we will have.”

How did Aston convince Newey to join?

Stroll took ownership of his Formula One team in 2018, when he rescued the failing Force India outfit from bankruptcy. It was a team that had regularly punched above its weight, but — working out of a factory built in 1990 to launch Eddie Jordan’s F3000 team to F1 the following year — had likely reached its ceiling.

Stroll, who earned his billions buying and selling luxury brands in the fashion industry, made clear from the start that he aspired to take his team to the very top of F1. Back in 2018, though, the idea of Racing Point — as it was then known — fighting Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari seemed far-fetched. The idea that it would do so with Newey at the head of its technical team was bordering on pure fantasy.

Looking back six years shows just how impactful Stroll’s vision, and money, can be.

The Canadian says he first approached Newey three years ago, around the same time the team was rebranded as Aston Martin, and a five-year plan to challenge for race wins and championships was mapped out. Included in that plan was the demolition of the old Jordan factory and the building of a brand-new facility with its own state-of-the-art wind tunnel.

At that stage, Stroll’s vision was in no way tangible. His team was struggling to break into the top half of the grid in 2021, had long outgrown its modest 1990s factory and was working out of a combination of permanent and temporary buildings surrounded by muddy farmland. Newey, meanwhile, was heading up F1’s preeminent aerodynamics department at Red Bull, winning the 2021 title with Max Verstappen while sowing the seeds for the team’s domination of the 2022 and 2023 seasons.

Fast forward through those successful Red Bull seasons to this April’s Japanese Grand Prix, and Newey decided it was time for a change. Newey has never spoken publicly about the exact reasons for his departure, save a boilerplate statement in which he said he was ready for a new challenge, but on his exit he negotiated an early release from his contract, which will allow him to join Aston Martin full-time on March 2, 2025.

“I decided to stop at Red Bull, which was kind of over the Suzuka weekend, back in April,” Newey said during a news conference on Tuesday at Aston Martin’s new factory. “Then I genuinely had no idea what would be next. I just wanted to have a blank mind, kind of take stock, enjoy a bit of a break, and was hoping that standing in a shower somewhere the spark would come and think, ‘This should be the direction.’

“Mandy [Newey’s wife] was a big part of that as well, of our discussions on what should we do. I think she was probably worried that I would drive her a bit mad if I was home too much.”

Soon after news of his split with Red Bull broke, reports emerged in Italy that Newey had met with Ferrari team principal Frédéric Vasseur. It seemed like the perfect marriage between F1’s most famous team and its most revered designer — a marriage that would only be sweetened by the prospect of Newey joining forces with Lewis Hamilton, who will move to Ferrari next year.

But Vasseur wasn’t the only one interested in Newey.

“We really did begin to speak briefly around three years back, but the most recent talks began in earnest when I read news of Adrian’s departure,” Stroll said. “Once I read that … well, I believe this is meant to be and I believe Adrian will share my visions; he’s a super-smart guy, so really it was really when I read the April departure.”

In June, Stroll invited Newey for a private tour of Aston Martin’s new factory, and it was around that time that the designer started to buy into the team’s vision.

“The building is clearly mightily impressive, and has a great feel to it, but the second bit is that it’s a real demonstration of Lawrence’s commitment and vision for where he wants the team to get to,” Newey said. “I don’t know how much it cost, but it’s not going to be cheap. The combination of seeing all the facilities, how nice a feel and how well thought out the building is, and perhaps most of all, that very visual demonstration of Lawrence.

“If I had to describe Lawrence in one sentence, he has total belief, he has a direction, and he’s happy to put all his chips on black, and that’s what he’s done.”

At which point Stroll, sitting next to Newey at Tuesday’s news conference, added: “In this case, green.”

Stroll was also able to offer something extra to Newey in the form of a shareholding in the team. It seems this appealed to Newey on a level that, perhaps, other teams couldn’t match, along with the prospect of working directly with the team owner as he had done earlier in his career at Williams and McLaren.

“Lawrence and I have known each other off and on over the years,” Newey said. “We often bump into each other at the gym, particularly at the Middle Eastern and Far East races.

“Really Lawrence’s passion and commitment and enthusiasm was very endearing, it’s very persuasive. The reality is if you go back 20 years, what we now call team principals were actually the owners of the teams — Frank Williams, Ron Dennis [at McLaren], Eddie Jordan, etc., etc.

“In this modern era, Lawrence is actually unique in being the only properly active team owner, and that does bring a different feeling when you have someone like Lawrence involved like that, it’s back to the old-school modelling.

“To have the chance to be a shareholder and a partner is something that hasn’t been offered to me before, so it’s a slightly different slant, it’s one I’m very much looking forward to. It became a very natural choice.”

Why is Newey so valuable?

Newey will join an already strong Aston Martin technical team that has made multiple big-name signings in recent years.

His former Red Bull colleague Dan Fallows is the technical director and works alongside former Mercedes head aerodynamicist Eric Blandin. Ferrari’s former technical director Enrico Cardile is due to join next year, while former Mercedes engine boss Andy Cowell will become group CEO on Oct. 1.

It is the F1 equivalent of Real Madrid’s Galacticos from the early 2000s, with Newey the equivalent of Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham combined.

Newey’s position will be to oversee the technical side of the team, but he will also be expected to bring the engineering magic on which his reputation is built. He often downplays the near-mythical qualities F1’s media imbue upon him, but as the only remaining lead designer to persist with a drawing board and pencil in a world of computer-automated design — and get results — he is undoubtedly one of a kind in the sport today.

In his book, “How to Build a Car,” Newey explains his approach by comparing his drawing board to his “first language” in car design.

“If I were to convert to CAD, I would have to learn something new, and there is not only a time penalty to doing that, but also a question as to whether I would be as fluent in my new language as I was in my old.”

During his time at Red Bull, Newey would keep two people working flat out to convert all his sketches to CAD — and those are only the ideas he deemed worthy enough to leave his drawing board and be converted into reality.

“I try to work in various ways,” Newey said when asked what he would bring to the team. “One is relatively solitary, which is standing at my drawing board trying to create and come up with ideas, and the second is, and the bigger proportion actually, working with my fellow engineers at all levels in all of the departments.”

Newey’s old-school approach is not limited to the way he works on his drawing board. His deep experience in motorsport means he takes a holistic approach to car design, understanding how different elements will interact and being able to make crucial value judgements based on the overall concept rather than individual gains.

Of course, he is not alone in being able to do that, but it is something that is harder for new engineers to grasp. The sheer size of F1 teams today means individuals starting out will work on specialised areas within departments. When Newey took his first F1 job out of university in 1980, he was hired as a “junior aerodynamicist,” but as the only aerodynamicist at the team, he took on the role of a senior aerodynamicist.

With his work across so many areas of racing, including working as Damon Hill’s race engineer when the British driver won the title in 1996, his understanding runs deep. Although he attends fewer grands prix than he used to, he says it is still a vital part of his job.

“And the third [part of my job],” he explains, “is going to the races, trying to understand what [the drivers] are feeling and turn their description of how the car is behaving into an engineering language and trying to search for the solution.”

For all the possibilities in Newey’s life, it’s racing that still makes him the most excited. Above all, it is the engineering challenge that keeps him coming back, and as long as Aston Martin can provide him an environment in which to be creative, it will reap the rewards.