Aston Martin won the ‘World Championship for most updates’ last season as new team boss Cowell sets out ambitious 2025 target

New Aston Martin team boss Andy Cowell has set out a “minimum” level the squad need to reach with car development going forward if they are to climb back up the pecking order and ultimately achieve their title-winning goal.

A couple of years ago, Aston Martin surprised the F1 paddock by emerging as Red Bull’s nearest 2023 challengers, having made significant progress for the second year of the sport’s latest ground-effect technical regulations.

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However, the team’s in-season development failed to live up to their new-found expectations and aerodynamic inefficiencies crept in – meaning regular podium finishes turned into solid points and fifth in the constructors’ standings.

Then, in 2024, Aston Martin found themselves cut adrift of the front-running battle between McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes from the outset, scoring just 94 points to the 280 achieved the year before and failing to finish on the podium.

While plenty of updates were still reaching the track, none transformed the Silverstone-based squad’s fortunes, and Cowell – who recently replaced Mike Krack as Team Principal – is clear about what needs to change.

Cowell recently took over the Aston Martin team boss role in place of Mike Krack

“There is no lack of effort throughout the team,” Cowell told the official Aston Martin website in a wide-ranging interview about his first few months at the operation.

“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.”

He continued: “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.

Aston Martin finished fifth in the 2024 standings, behind McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes

“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 per cent 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.”

Aston Martin will continue with an unchanged driver line-up of Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll in 2025, while a host of new technical signings – including Enrico Cardile from Ferrari and Adrian Newey from Red Bull – get set to start work.