Formula 1 has a new boss on the grid for 2025, with Andy Cowell succeeding Mike Krack as Aston Martin principal.
Cowell was only announced as joining Aston Martin in July 2024, with the British engineer stepping into his role as Group CEO – replacing the departing Martin Whitmarsh – in October 2024.
Cowell’s return to F1 after four years away from the sport between 2020 and ’24 has seen him rapidly rise back to prominence in just a few short months.
While Aston Martin has shown that Mike Krack will return to a leadership role on the track for F1 2025, Cowell has taken on the role of team principal and CEO of the F1 team instead. Although accustomed to leadership roles, Cowell faces a new challenge in that he takes on the duty of an F1 team as a whole, rather than the more explicit roles he has played in the past.
Prior to joining Aston Martin as Group CEO, Cowell’s most recent F1 experience at Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains.
As Managing Director of the Brixworth facility, he was regarded as one of the cornerstones of Mercedes’ domination of Formula 1 between 2014 and ’20.
Cowell had succeeded Thomas Fuhr in the role and spent 2013 racing the PU106A V6, Brixworth’s first F1 hybrid engine and the engine that set the course for years to come.
Such was the dominance of Mercedes’ engines that former Mercedes CEO Paddy Lowe revealed in 2021 that in 2014, Mercedes ran its engines in a sort of “idle” mode to hide the true dominant functionality that the power unit had. opting instead to deliver enough strength to remain at the front.
Under Cowell’s leadership, Mercedes’ powertrain proved to be the standard-bearer: only Ferrari’s powertrain came close at the end of the decade, before the Scuderia was forced to make adjustments to its engine architecture after an agreement with the FIA over suspicions about how the engine worked. The Italian team operated its propulsion systems.
While the engine freeze of recent years has largely levelled the playing field when it comes to engines, Cowell’s ability to unlock the potential within the walls of HPP was proven year-on-year as Mercedes racked up 12 world titles in six years. Cowell’s engines delivered the Drivers’ Championship to Mercedes every year between 2014 and 2020.
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Leaving HPP in June 2020, Cowell was succeeded by Hywel Thomas, who carried on the momentum to lead another Mercedes title in 2021 as the Brackley-based squad wrapped up the Constructors’ Championship.
Prior to assuming the role of CEO, Cowell served as director of engineering at HPP since mid-2008. He oversaw the technical direction of all HPP engine and propulsion system projects. Mercedes, the progression of the KERS hybrid system.
This leadership in V8 engine allocation dates back to 2004, when he joined HPP (then known as Ilmor) as lead engineer for the FQ V10 engine. By powering McLaren in 2004 and 2005, Mercedes’ V10 broke the barriers of functionality: at the expense of reliability, and ended the era of the V10 considered the toughest in the game by surpassing the 1,000 hp mark.
In fact, natural strength and Cowell seemed inextricably connected: his experience before joining Mercedes was at BMW Motorsport, which developed engines for Williams. On low-downforce and power-hungry circuits such as Hockenheim and Monza, Williams was the team to beat thanks to the P80 engine series to which Cowell contributed.
Cowell’s first experience in F1 was within the engineering company responsible for the Cosworth CR engines that powered Stewart (formerly Jaguar), Jordan, Arrows and Minardi in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He had joined to Cosworth as a college graduate after reading mechanical engineering.
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