With Andy Cowell having taken over as Aston Martin team boss from Mike Krack, he has revealed where he spotted clear weaknesses at the tail end of the F1 2024 season.

Having arrived as Aston Martin’s CEO in October 2024, succeeding Martin Whitmarsh, Cowell made some structural changes to the team’s management by making himself team boss, with Mike Krack moved into a new role as chief trackside officer.

Andy Cowell: Aston Martin won the ‘Most Updates World Championship’

Speaking to the Aston Martin website after his first 100 days in charge at Lawrence Stroll’s team, Cowell explained some of what he’d found in that time period.

His first race since the tail end of 2019 – when he was managing director of Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains – was at the 2024 United States Grand Prix, the same race at which the team rolled out a comprehensive upgrade package.

These updates included changes to the front wing and endplates, the engine cover, the floor, and the rear diffuser. But, despite the changes, it had little impact on Aston Martin’s relative competitiveness.

The Silverstone-based team struggled to make inroads into its performance deficit to the leading teams throughout 2024, despite introducing plenty of upgrades – a story that mirrored what happened in 2023, as the team’s AMR23 went off the boil after a very strong start to the year.

Technical director Dan Fallows departed his role in November 2024, moving to another role within the Aston Martin organisation, with Enrico Cardile now leading Aston Martin’s development as chief technical officer. Adrian Newey, formerly of Red Bull, starts work on March 3rd and will assume the role of managing technical partner.

“There is no lack of effort throughout the team,” Cowell said when asked if quality, rather than quantity, is the aim with the upgrade path of the AMR25 this year.

“We definitely won the World Championship for the most updates in 2024, but those updates didn’t deliver the lap time – and what everybody wants in this business is to deliver lap time.

“That’s not to say we must get it right every time. I’ve seen statistics that show that in true research and development environments, a 20 per cent success rate is high.

“If we can get a 20 per cent success rate then that’s good, but the difference is that this needs to happen at the AMR Technology Campus and not at the track.

“We need to make sure that all our tools and processes at the Technology Campus are working well enough to ensure that whenever we take an update to the circuit, we are at least 90 per cent certain that it’s going to work on the track and meet our expectations.

“It’s not easy to achieve, but it’s what we need to be aiming for. We’ve got very powerful CFD tools and the most advanced wind tunnel in the sport coming online but they are only simulations; there will always be the risk of data not quite matching up with what we find on the circuit, but our simulations can give us a robust steer and I’m confident we can get to the point where we’re right 90 percent of the time.

“That’s the level that World Championship-winning teams are operating at so that needs to be our aim at a minimum.

“The update the team brought to Austin for the United States Grand Prix last year provided a working example. It didn’t deliver the performance step expected; it’s been a case of digging deeper to understand why this happened and implementing changes so that when we bring our next update to the track, which will be our 2025 challenger at the season opener in Melbourne, we’re in a better position and it does deliver what we expect.”

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Given the number of high-level technical and engineering staff in management positions at Aston Martin – including himself – Cowell said there will be an element of challenge in getting everything to mesh together.

“It’s very much a case of trying to understand people, what their strengths are, how they can contribute to the overall objective, and then you’ve got to stitch the organisation together,” he said.

“Everyone should be playing to their strengths, so it’s about working out what they are, how they fit in, and how they can contribute to the car. It’s up to me to make sure we’ve got the strength and balance in the team to deliver the best reward in terms of laptime.”

With Stroll pushing hard to turn the former Jordan/Force India team into a world championship-challenging team – an area Cowell has plenty of experience with from leading Mercedes’ power unit department during the unprecedented run of domination between 2014 and ’20 – he revealed the approach he’s taking to leading the team in its bid.

“This all comes down to building an organisation that’s sustainable – sustainable in the sense that you’re not compromising future performance by throwing everything at just one season,” he said.

“Yes, you need to be able to focus on the development of this year’s car and you need a group of people focused on getting the best performance from the car at the track throughout the season, but it’s also about making sure that there is sufficient focus on the development of next year’s car and the car after that.

“You want to avoid a scenario where people are straddling multiple years because people tend to focus on immediate priorities and future priorities end up compromised.

“It’s about investing in the future – investing in those new ideas that no one else has pursued yet and hitting those challenging targets.

“You need a group of people who want to climb Everest more than once – who are prepared to do whatever it takes to climb to the top and then do it all over again, and again, and again. That’s the fundamental attitude and spirit that Lawrence and I are trying to build within the business.”

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