What's going so wrong with Aston Martin's 2025 F1 season

After its worst start to a Formula 1 season since 2022, Aston Martin is well aware that it needs to do something to turn around the tricky situation it finds itself in.

Three years ago its lack of results was down to factors like the suite of new facilities via a huge investment from Lawrence Stroll still being under construction, key signings not yet being in place, on top of the team losing then-star driver Sebastian Vettel to Covid on the eve of the campaign, as he missed the opening two races of the season.

But now, with its regular line-up in place, a £150 million factory up and running (including a state-of-the-art windtunnel) and Adrian Newey having been lured from Red Bull, everything Aston Martin needs to deliver is in place. And yet it isn’t.

The team has come away from the recent triple-header in Japan, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia respectively without a single point to its name, and both drivers seem a bit exacerbated by the situation they find themselves in.

Speaking about whether he saw any strengths in the AMR25, Lance Stroll said in Saudi Arabia: “I don’t think so. I don’t think there are any real strengths.

“We are not the quickest car in a high-speed corner, we’re not the best car in low-speed traction. Maybe straight-line braking, we’re quite okay.”

For Fernando Alonso, who is still chasing his first points of the season, what’s being delivered by the trackside team is the absolute limit. The onus is now on those back at base to do something more.

“We really need something from the factory, not from the trackside,” he said. “There, I think we've run out of ideas at the moment.” 

Complicated choices

The problem for Aston Martin is that, while it knows that the best route out of its current woes is to upgrade its car, this is actually much easier said than done – for two key reasons.

The first is that the 2026 rules are looming on the horizon, and Aston Martin is adamant that it does not want to divert any effort off next year, because the regulation shake-up offers it an excellent opportunity to smash its way to the front.

This is primarily why Newey has not been pulled back onto the 2025 car project, because Aston Martin does not want to waste a second of time worrying about the present in case it compromises its future.

But the other problem Aston Martin faces in improving its car is that, as has been seen over the past two seasons, upgrading its car has been Aston Martin's biggest weakness.

Aston Martin failed to build on its super-strong start to 2023, as it hit trouble in its efforts to deliver more performance. Developments introduced only served to bring with them handling problems that made its challenger more difficult to drive.

It was a similar story in 2024 when upgrades again only served to make things worse – with it having to abandon a new floor entirely after the United States Grand Prix as it hunted for answers as to why what its windtunnel was telling it was not the same as real life.

Wrong decisions

For Stroll, the situation that Aston Martin finds itself in now is the result of many wrong decisions made over the last 24 months.

One of these includes a focus it had on chasing peak downforce – which proved difficult to tap into because of the complications of the current ground effect machinery. Aston duly shifted attention this year in a bid to chase more usable downforce.

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Asked why things had gone downhill since the start of 2023, Stroll said: “I think if we had the answer to that question, we wouldn’t be where we are today,

“I think just decisions on what path to take with upgrades and which areas to focus on, probably in hindsight some of those things were not the right things and could have been different…not probably, I assume that’s what it is, just speaking with the guys and looking at where we are.

“We’re not nearly as competitive as we were two years ago, so something didn’t go right along the way, that’s for sure. We have a better understanding of what is wrong with the car and areas to improve on.

“But time is our enemy with that kind of thing. Formula 1’s a development race. When you’ve fallen behind you’re catching up, so I think it’s just a lot of decisions over the last 24 months that weren’t the right ones.”

Plotting the recovery

The challenge for Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell is how to bring improvements to this car without diverting resources from next year or opening the door for a repeat of the upgrade headaches the team has faced in the past.

For having stumbled plenty of times with developments over the past two seasons, it would be futile to rush things through the system in the hope of being better if there is no clear evidence that the team has learned from its past errors.

Upgrades are anticipated for one of the next few races, but they will only be greenlit once the team is sure about the step forward they will deliver.

As Cowell observed about the need to do better this time around: “We have struggled to add performance to the car. We are pushing in a different direction, but turning that into pace that Lance and Fernando can use is the challenge.”

This is why it has put its 2025 car into its brand new windtunnel, to try to get a second opinion on its weaknesses as it compares track data to that of the Mercedes facility it used in its development.

Cowell said: “The car we’re racing at the moment was created away from our own wind tunnel.

“We are learning a lot from the measurements we can take at the track - which is the third world for the aerodynamicists - but we’ve got a 25 model in our windtunnel at Silverstone, and the CFD data, and we’re spending a lot of time looking into the correlation between the track world, windtunnel and CFD to understand the differences we see there.”

Filtering Newey’s input

Cowell knows that processes need to be in place first before better results can be expected – and it is in this area where it can lean on Newey a bit more to help.

For any effort Newey can make in improving the infrastructure needed for the 2026 car, should also help it get to the bottom of improvements for its 2025 challenger.

For there was a clear hint from Cowell in Jeddah that, while Aston Martin has some hugely impressive tools back at base, they may not be being used in the best possible way.

“Adrian’s hugely complimentary about the campus, and has been positive about the tunnel that we’ve got and the way that everything’s been set up,” he said.

“He is, of course, pushing for us to improve the way we operate in the tunnel, the way we operate with CFD, the way we operate with lap simulations - so pretty much everything Adrian’s got thoughts on how to improve.”

Cowell clearly does not want to pull anything away from 2026 – be it the focus of personnel or even team spending.

The budget concerns are also increased because Aston Martin will be using its own gearbox from 2026 – so there are some extra burdens coming into the system that it has not had to deal with in recent years.

But according to Cowell, that doesn't mean there isn't the opportunity to lean into the future project to help its current predicament.

“What we're trying to focus on is, what are the technologies that work for both cars?” he said.

“So let's use the 25 campaign as a way of refining. There are simulation tools, there are techniques, there are components, there are technologies that apply to both.

“And that's where we're trying to have our eyes open and not just get drawn into the fact that aero is restricted, and therefore you focus a big chunk on next year. It's all the other areas.

“So what light-weighting technologies can we develop and race prove out this year, so that we're ready for next year?

“What tyre observation technologies and simulations can we develop and embed for this year? What race strategies can we develop?

“So it's trying to lift everything, every single department to look at, what can we do to improve.”

The need for upgrades

But for all the talk of better processes and improvements flowing through the system, it is obvious that without upgrades, Aston Martin is going to struggle to score consistent points over the remainder of the campaign.

With all eyes now on what will come out of the Silverstone factory over the next few weeks, there remains a big push to try to ensure that 2025 is not a complete write-off.

“We've got 19 races ahead of us now,” said Cowell. “We want to come and do our best, and we want to learn. So we're not abandoning everything. We want to get points.

“And there's definitely technology we can develop and race and introduce on this car that will benefit.”

For Alonso and Stroll, that cannot come soon enough.