Formula 1: Andy Cowell named Aston Martin team principal 
2025-01-10
Category: sports

Aston Martin's new Formula 1 boss Andy Cowell will take on the role of team principal in addition to his position as chief executive officer.The 55-year-old, who joined Aston Martin in October, takes over the team boss role from Mike Krack, who has been effectively demoted into a new role focused on performance at the race track.Enrico Cardile, who has joined from Ferrari as chief technical officer, will be in charge of designing the race cars. There is still no official date for when Cardile, who left Ferrari last July, starts work for Aston Martin.Design legend Adrian Newey, who is joining as managing technical partner on 2 March, will sit at the top of the design and engineering structure alongside Cowell. The moves mark a major restructure for a team that has invested millions in a new factory and wind tunnel with the ambition of becoming world champions.As part of the changes, Tom McCullough, who has led trackside engineering as performance director for some years, is moving to a new role with Aston Martin's other racing categories.Cowell, who was formerly head of Mercedes' F1 engine division from 2008-20, said: "I have spent the last three months understanding and assessing our performance, and I've been incredibly impressed by the dedication, commitment and hard work of this team."With the completion of the AMR Technology Campus and our transition in 2026 to a full works team, we are on a journey to becoming a championship-winning team."These organisational changes are a natural evolution of the multi-year plans that we have scheduled to make and I'm incredibly excited about the future."
Aston Martin are taking over Honda engines from Red Bull at the start of 2026.The changes create separate teams focused trackside and at the factory, both reporting into Cowell.They come after two seasons in which Aston Martin have started strongly only to fade as they have been unable to keep up with the development rate of their rivals.Fernando Alonso scored six podiums in the first eight races of 2023 as Aston Martin  - formerly Racing Point and Force India - leapt from perennial midfielders to be Red Bull's closest challengers.But the team fell back in the second half of the year, and after starting 2024 less competitively than 2023 but with some strong qualifying performances, the same pattern developed.Dan Fallows, who had joined Aston Martin in 2022, was removed from his position as technical director late last year as a result. He remains with the group in another capacity.The recruitment of Cowell, Newey and Cardile were the biggest moves in a series of developments in which billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll is seeking to turn the team into front-runners.Stroll has funded a state-of-the-art new factory at their base in Silverstone and a new wind tunnel there is about to come on stream.Two-time champion Alonso last year signed a new two-year contract that will keep him at the team until the end of 2026, by which time he will be 45.He said in a BBC Sport interview last December that he "still dreams of a third world title" but would go into 2026 thinking of it as his last season in F1, but did not rule out staying on if he continued to feel competitive.