How Andy Cowell will manage Newey and Aston Martin’s galaxy of stars

Aston Martin’s new team boss Andy Cowell has explained the approach he’s taking to having plenty of top-level engineering names under his command.

Cowell replaced Mike Krack as team boss at the Silverstone-based squad over the winter, with the British engineer tempted into a return to Formula 1 by Lawrence Stroll’s increasingly-strong Aston Martin squad.

Andy Cowell: An F1 race team is more outward facing

Cowell made his return to Formula 1 in October 2024, starting work with Aston Martin as the Group CEO as a replacement for the retiring Martin Whitmarsh.

Cowell had been the managing director of Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains (HPP) up until 2020, and was the architect behind the dominant V6 hybrid power units that propelled Mercedes to multiple titles.

Stepping out of Formula 1 for over four years, he resisted other offers to return to the paddock but was tempted by team owner Lawrence Stroll to help run the Silverstone-based squad as his huge investments – both financially and infrastructurally – start to reach the point at which potential must start turning into reward.

It’s a different challenge for Cowell, whose impressive management resumé consists of power unit and engine departments stemming back over two decades, including stints at Cosworth and BMW before switching to Ilmor-Mercedes in 2004.

Having risen to the top of the world of power unit manufacturing, taking on the broader challenge of management of an entire F1 team is one he’s savouring, and he’s opened up on the parallels he’s found over his first few months with his feet under the desk at Aston Martin.

“From an engineering perspective, I guess the world of aerodynamics is new, but, at the end of the day, it’s still engineering,” Cowell exclusively told PlanetF1.com in a far-ranging interview carried out during pre-season testing in Bahrain.

“Whether you’re engineering a power unit or engineering a race car, it’s maths, it’s physics, it’s understanding what the performance sensitivities are.

“It’s spending your time on the most rewarding – aerodynamics, and it’s relentless pursuit of improvement, and just having an open-minded view that there is no optimum. There’s always improvement. So I think there’s huge parallels there.

“The world of a race team has got more of an outward facing aspect. Interviews like this are more frequent! But I completely understand that.

“The partners that we’ve got, they’re all top drawer partners. They’re all keen to work with the Aston Martin brand. I see it as a real honour to help pull the team together and showcase all of these partners to the world.

“We’re working for our fans. There are millions of fans that we’re trying to entertain, we’re trying to please them, and you do that by making a fast race car and having successful Sundays.

“But, on the journey to that, there’s talking about what we’re doing, there’s explaining what we’re doing and trying to be transparent with the journey that we’re taking. So that’s a change.”

More on Aston Martin in F1

? Lawrence Stroll: How the Aston Martin F1 owner made his $3.9 billion fortune

? Adrian Newey: All you need to know about his sensational Aston Martin move

Cowell himself is a world-class engineer, but he’s just one of many at Aston Martin, which has become increasingly stacked in recent months with the arrival of names like Bob Bell as executive director for the technical department, Adrian Newey as managing technical partner at the top of the organisation’s technical structure, and securing the signature of former Ferrari technical director Enrico Cardile, alongside existing talent like Eric Blandin and Mike Krack.

With such a roster of names, the possibility of there being too many cooks is a realistic one – so how does Cowell plan on ensuring that all these minds are listened to and accomodated without anyone feeling invisible or sidelined?

“I think that comes back to making sure that everybody’s responsibilities are clear,” he said.

“There’s a strong executive team in place already at Silverstone. We’re adding to that with experienced technical leaders. But every single one of those people you’ve mentioned understand that it’s a team game, and everybody’s got their own individual strengths.

“It’s about harnessing all those individual strengths, gluing it together, and making sure that… we’ve got great competitive ingenuity, but we’ve also got the means to do experiments on campus in Silverstone, where we conclude that the initial idea is going to make the race car quicker, and then we swiftly decide to turn the operations machine to make full size parts, and they arrive at the circuit quicker than ever before, manufactured to a great quality standard, they fit perfectly.

“Every single measurement on the car says, ‘Yes, it’s going to go quicker’, and it matches in precisely with what was measured in the factory, and any deviation from that – whether we get more lap time at the track or less laptime at the track – is a quality gap. It’s a breakdown in correlation.

“Adrian knows full well… he’s a creative genius when it comes to race cars, he’s very competitive, but he knows it’s the strength of the whole organisation, and I think that’s one of the things that he’s attracted to, with regards to Lawrence’s vision of having all the building blocks in place.

“We’ll work as a team, and we’ll give each other open, honest feedback. I’m very open to that myself and all the people that I’m working with.

“I’m saying, ‘Help me. Help me get better. Point out if I’ve just done something that you think daft. Let’s have a chat. Don’t sit on it and fester’.

“I think that sort of honest constructive feedback, that’s the way we all get better – we’ll all play to our strengths and, hopefully, end up with a high-performing team and an exceptionally fast race car.”

It’s a big challenge for Cowell, who – after four years away from F1 – has leapt back in with both feet to take on the task of bringing Stroll’s vision to life, all while having to manage a roster of brilliant minds.

As an experienced manager, does he foresee himself being the type that needs to crack the whip, taking on a ‘my way or the highway’ type approach if it’s needed to keep everything and everyone in check?

That won’t be the case, he explained, saying his approach is much more focused on ensuring everyone’s strengths are taken into consideration.

“I try to spend time observing, listening, and understanding the first principles of what’s being done in a department and make sure that that’s well defined and that everybody stays focused on that,” he said.

“It’s very easy in life to drift away from your core responsibilities and start doing other areas of a business.

“I’m a big believer that every department is super important. Strive for perfection in every department. Always be restless, and then we get better.

Even in communications, with interviews, I ask after each interview, after each week, ‘What can I do better? Is that okay? What could be done better?’ And I get a weekly email saying ‘Less ‘Ums’, Andy!’ ”

Read Next: The rumoured eye-watering figures behind Piastri’s new McLaren contract