RacingAston Martin’s 2026 slide has turned into a debate about Adrian Newey’s job, not the team’s budget or buildings. With Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll stuck in a season of retirements and weak finishes, former Haas team boss Günther Steiner has said Aston Martin made the wrong call by putting Newey in charge, while fresh talk around Jonathan Wheatley has only sharpened the focus on who should actually run the team.
Steiner, the former Haas team boss, said on the Drive to Wynn podcast that Newey is “clearly not in the right place” as team principal. In translated remarks on the podcast, Steiner said: “I think if you asked Adrian, he would say, ‘I don’t know why I did this or why I agreed to it.’” Steiner said he does not know how it happened or whether Newey wanted the role, but he argued that the fit looks wrong.
He tied that directly to what is happening on track. According to the source summary, Alonso’s best result so far is only 18th in Japan, Alonso and Stroll have retired five times because of problems with the AMR26, and Aston Martin sits last in the constructors’ championship. Steiner’s point was not that Newey suddenly forgot how to build a fast car. It was that Aston Martin moved one of Formula 1’s best designers away from his strongest area at the worst possible time.
Steiner, speaking as the former Haas team boss on the Drive to Wynn podcast, said: “He is very good at what he does, which is designing cars.” He added that people should be used where their strengths are, saying Aston Martin should “never just over-promote someone.” In another translated passage from the same podcast, Steiner said Newey may have taken the job without fully understanding what being team boss involves.
That argument is now colliding with another strand of the story: Aston Martin’s uncertainty over leadership beneath owner Lawrence Stroll and around its Honda future. MARCA MOTOR reported on April 15 that Jonathan Wheatley left Audi with immediate effect in late March amid rumors he could join Aston Martin as team director, a role the report said is currently held by Newey. Aston Martin dismissed those reports as “speculation,” according to MARCA MOTOR, but the same report said Wheatley’s arrival would allow Newey to return to exclusively technical work, which he prefers.
Will Buxton, described in the source material as an analyst working in the World Championship, said on the Up to Speed podcast that the job itself may already look poisoned. In translated remarks on the podcast, Buxton said: “Who the hell would want it? Because who wants to take on a job knowing that, in the end, it is going to fail for at least the next year, if not two?”
Buxton, speaking as an analyst on the Up to Speed podcast, went even further on the Honda side. In translated remarks, he called Aston Martin’s Honda situation “a disaster” and said it is as bad as, or worse than, McLaren’s troubled 2015 reunion with Honda. He pointed to the length of that recovery, saying Honda did not win a grand prix again until 2019 with Red Bull, in its fifth season after returning, while McLaren did not win again until 2021 with Mercedes power.
From there, Buxton said on the Up to Speed podcast that Aston Martin could be “completely lost” for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of this decade. He also said any Wheatley-led turnaround would likely not bring wins or titles before 2030. For a team that has invested in Alonso, Newey, Andy Cowell and a new factory, that is where the story has landed: the spending is already done, but senior voices in the paddock are saying the structure still does not look right.