September 10, 2024, was a joyous day for the Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 team.

It was on that day that the group, which, like the automaker it takes its name from, is under the auspices of Lawrence Stroll, announced it had reached an agreement with Adrian Newey to have him become its new managing technical partner and team principal. For months, the entire sport had wondered where the revered designer would end up following his incredibly successful time with Red Bull Racing, and it turned out the answer was Aston Martin.

Newey isn’t just a great race-car designer; he’s arguably the best in modern F1 history. Since 1988, and across stints at Leyton House, Williams, McLaren, and Red Bull, Newey-designed cars have won 14 drivers’ championships, 12 constructors’ championships, and a mind-boggling 293 grands prix. He had even found time to design a hypercar, the RB17, towards the end of his Red Bull tenure. With a C.V. like that, it’s little wonder why everyone associated with Aston Martin’s F1 team was so excited.

“Adrian shares our hunger and ambition, he believes in this project, and he will help us write the next chapter in Aston Martin Aramco’s Formula One story,” Stroll said in a statement at the time. But now, nearly a year-and-a-half later, that next chapter isn’t looking as hopeful as originally envisioned.

Aston Martin may be one of the world’s most famous sports car makers, but its name recognition owes more to exploits on the silver screen, in the James Bond movies, than on racetracks. In fact, the team’s history in motorsport’s premier competition, Formula 1, is likely significantly shorter than you may realize.

Under the oversight of David Brown, the marque first competed in Formula 1 in 1959. Across that season, and the following, the team and the automaker’s first open-wheel race car, the DBR4, failed to register a single championship point. That was enough for the manufacturer, which decided it had better uses for its money.

And that was it for Aston Martin and Formula 1 until Lawrence Stroll became the co-owner and chairman in early 2020 (the company did serve as sponsor for Red Bull for several seasons last decade). Soon after, it was announced that Stroll’s racing team, Racing Point, would rebrand as Aston Martin F1 starting with the 2021 season.

The team’s first two seasons as Aston Martin went about how you’d expect. The team may have had a new name and racing green livery, but it wasn’t starting from scratch. Utilizing custom Mercedes power units, the team, with Stroll’s son Lance and former four-time driver’s champion Sebastian Vettel in the seats of its cars, finished seventh in both 2021 and 2022. Then, in 2023, two-time driver’s champ Fernando Alonso replaced Vettel, scored eight podium finishes, and helped push the team to fifth in the constructors’ standings.

Going into the 2024 season, there was reason to believe that Aston Martin was on the verge of leveling up, but the progress began to slow. The team again finished fifth that season, but managed just a third of the previous season’s points (94 points compared to 280), and neither Alonso nor Stroll managed a podium finish across 24 races. In 2025, things got even worse, with the team falling back to seventh after being overtaken by Williams and the Racing Bulls.

But, two weeks into the 2026 season, even the thought of finishing seventh for a second straight season is beginning to feel out of reach. Under the terms of his exit from Red Bull, Newey wasn’t able to start working for Aston Martin until March 1, 2025. Rather than start working on last season’s race car, the AMR25, the team decided it would be best for the designer to focus on its successor, the AMR26.

There were a few reasons for this. First, while it may have sounded like Newey was getting a head start on the competition, other teams had actually been working on their 2026 cars since January of last year. AMR26 would also feature a bespoke power train from Aston Martin’s new partner, Honda, and would be subject to a new set of design, financial, and technical regulations meant to make a series that had lacked drama in recent years more competitive.

So far, this combination of factors has proven to be too much for Aston Martin to overcome. That was becoming clear during pre-season testing, when AMR26 wasn’t ready for full training sessions in Barcelona or Bahrain. It was assumed that this was because issues with the new power train were causing reliability issues, but then, before the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, Newey revealed it was even worse than that. The team principal told the press that the new power unit was causing vibrations so fierce that neither of his drivers could physically complete a race, with Alonso able to handle 25 laps behind the wheel of the car and Stroll 15 laps before potentially suffering permanent nerve damage.

Sure enough, this has been the case at the Australian and Chinese Grand Prix. In the first race, Alonso was forced to retire, while Stroll was not classified after he failed to complete 90-percent of the race distance. In the next race, both drivers were forced to retire.

“Yeah, I could not probably finish the race anyway. The vibration level was very high today,” Alonso told ESPN after the race in China. “At one point, from lap 20 to 33, I was struggling a little bit to feel my hands and my feet.”

Two weeks into the new season and Aston Martin is tied in last place with Formula 1 newcomer Cadillac. But all is not lost for the team just yet. It has two weeks to try to improve its car before the season’s third race, this one in Japan. Then, the team, along with the rest of the field, will have a month off due to the cancellation of races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia because of the war with Iran That gives the team, and most importantly Newey, some time to figure out what’s going on.