With Andy Cowell replacing Mike Krack as Aston Martin team boss, he has revealed where weaknesses appear at the end of the 2024 F1 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.
Speaking to Aston Martin’s website after his first hundred days in Lawrence Stroll’s team, Cowell explained some of what he had discovered at that time.
His first race since late 2019, when he was Mercedes’ general manager of high-performance powertrains, came at the 2024 United States Grand Prix, the same race in which the team implemented a comprehensive series of improvements.
These updates included adjustments to the front trim and trim plates, engine hood, floor and rear diffuser. But despite the adjustments, they have had little effect 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.
It’s in the team’s inability to maximize the effect of its innovations that Cowell sees a key weakness to address this season.
“There’s no shortage of effort within the team,” Cowell said when asked if quality, and not quantity, was the focus of the AMR25 update 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 doesn’t mean we have to succeed each and every time. I’ve noticed that statistics show that in a genuine environment of study and progression, a 20% good luck rate is high.
“If we can get a 20% pass rate, that’s great, but the difference is that it has to be at the AMR Technology Campus and not on the track.
“We want to make sure that all of our equipment and processes at the Technology Campus are working well enough to ensure that every time we make an upgrade to the circuit, we are at least 90 percent confident that it will work correctly. ” track and meet standards. 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.
“This is the point where the World Championship winning groups play, so that will have to be at least our goal.
“The update the team made in Austin for the United States Grand Prix last year provided a concrete example. He did not deliver the expected performance; it took a deeper dive to perceive why this happened and implement adjustments so that when we do our next track upgrade, which will be our challenge for 2025 when the season starts in Melbourne, we are in a better position and delivering on what we expect.
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Given the number of senior technicians and engineers in senior positions at Aston Martin (himself), Cowell said it would be a challenge to get it all together.
“It’s about perceiving people, what their strengths are, how they can contribute to the overall goal, and then you have to bring the organization 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.”
As Stroll strives to turn the former Jordan/Force India team into a world championship challenger, a dominance Cowell takes great delight in as he leads Mercedes’ branch of the force unit to unprecedented dominance between 2014 and 2020, the technique has been revealed. is taking to lead the team in their bet.
“It all comes down to building an organization that is sustainable, sustainable in the sense that you don’t compromise long-term functionality by throwing everything away in one season,” he said.
“Yes, you want to be able to focus on developing this year’s car and you need an organization of other people focused on getting the best functionality out of the car on the track during the season, but it’s also about making sure there is enough focus on presenting the next year’s car and the year after that.
“You find yourself in a situation where other people are straddling several years because they have a tendency to focus on immediate priorities and long-term priorities end up being 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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