Revealed: The truth behind Aston Martin’s management changes for F1 2025

Andy Cowell sees his role doubled up at Aston Martin, with his Group CEO position now added to with team principal duties.
Just weeks into taking charge at Aston Martin, Andy Cowell has set about instigating change at the Silverstone-based squad.
Aston Martin confirmed a complete restructuring of its managerial team for the F1 2025 season, which included a change of role for 2024 team boss Mike Krack.
Why has Aston Martin opted for leadership changes?
Aston Martin’s fall-off in performance during the 2024 season wasn’t taken lightly.
Podiums and victory contention in 2023 gave way to scrapping over lowly points finishes, even if the end result – fifth place in the championship – remained the same.
But while on-track wasn’t going as well as hoped, the off-track building of what team owner Lawrence Stroll hopes will become a championship-winning team continued unabated.
This included the continued revitalisation of the former Jordan/Force India facility at Silverstone, with the team having moved into the Aston Martin Technology Campus in the middle of 2023.
Alongside the infrastructure refreshment – which included a brand-new simulator and wind tunnel alongside its state-of-the-art R&D and manufacturing facilities – getting the right people into the right positions has also been a priority.
On the technical front, a high-profile signing such as former Ferrari chassis technical director Enrico Cardile becoming chief technical officer was already reason to smile, but securing the services of Adrian Newey as managing technical partner – an all-encapsulating role for Aston Martin’s technical departments – firmly underlined Stroll’s intent.
With Group CEO Martin Whitmarsh taking a step back from the coalface as he has reached retirement age, Stroll also managed to secure the services of Andy Cowell after tempting the 55-year-old to return to the sport after four years away.
Newey may have been the headline-grabber of 2024 for Aston Martin, but Cowell’s resumé is that of a proven performer of a similar ilk on the engine front.
With more than 20 years of engine-building experience, his 16 years at Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains (and, formerly, Ilmor) earned him a seat at the table when it comes to discussing the Mercedes ‘dream team’ of dominance between 2014 and ’20.
Cowell, managing director of HPP, directly oversaw the development of Mercedes’ initial hybrid power unit – the engine that was so infamously superior to the rest that its full potential was rarely exploited out of fear steps would be taken to rein in Mercedes’ imperious performance.
Cowell’s engines powered Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg to that unprecedented run of championships before the engineer opted to leave shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020 – his final race before the 2024 United States Grand Prix was the 2019 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Like Newey, Cowell appears to have been fully convinced of the potential at Aston Martin, leading to him signing on to succeed Whitmarsh within the organisation – a huge coup for Stroll, given that Cowell has admitted that he had left F1 with no intent of returning.
Starting work in October 2024, Cowell closely monitored how the team operated over his first 100 days in charge, before making the decisions that led to this week’s announcement of a reshuffle of the team’s organisational structure.
The biggest change of all is that Cowell has appointed himself to serve as the team principal, as well as his role as Group CEO.
Krack, having been team boss for three years, will become chief trackside officer – a new role in the team and, indeed, Formula 1.
On paper, this may appear to be a demotion, but the reality is somewhat different – Krack isn’t being punished for the team’s inability to develop on the right path in 2024.
It’s a clearer delineation of responsibilities, which Aston Martin explained as a “flatter structure” in its announcement of the changes.
It’s indicative of how the role of the modern-day team principal role has evolved. Once upon a time, it was possible for individuals – think Ron Dennis, Frank Williams, Flavio Briatore – to be able to keep track of everything going on in a team, as well as handle all the external demands such as sponsorship and marketing, or matters such as F1 Commission meetings.
Aston Martin has thus opted for something similar to what other teams have chosen, like McLaren and Racing Bulls.
A CEO role, like Zak Brown and Peter Bayer handle at those teams respectively, means Andrea Stella and Laurent Mekies are freed up to concentrate on the on-track matters.
“The thing you realise when you have a little bit of time to reflect is what it is that interests you, and, for me, it’s efficiency,” Cowell told media shortly after taking over.
“The thing that I hated was wasting time, so if, as an organisation, it wasn’t efficient, that made me grumpy.
“So I’ve used that approach with some other industries and some other topics [during my hour years out]. I guess that’s what I’m going to try and do for Aston Martin as well, to look at aero efficiency.
“The organisation, how do we get it so that the 900 people at Silverstone are organised well, so that their day is efficient?
“It makes me grumpy if there’s an overlap of responsibility, it makes me grumpier still if there’s a gap and there’s a lack of communication.
“How do we get 900 people to work efficiently, so it’s like one brain? Writing reports and having meetings, I’m not too keen on that sort of thing.”
Given Cowell’s proven record at both engineering and people management, his concentration on this area frees Krack – another engineer – up to concentrate on the matter of car performance.
Aston Martin’s Aerodynamics, Engineering, and Performance departments will be led by Krack at trackside, with the Luxembourger also being the lead team representative when Cowell isn’t at a race, while Cardile will look after the same departments at the team factory – both men then reporting into Cowell.
Of course, given he was the main man for three years, one might expect Krack to be somewhat miffed by the changes – even if it is a organisational reshuffle in which his responsibilities simply become more clear, the external optics of it are that Krack is no longer the boss and has been demoted.
But these optics are of no concern to Krack, sources have indicated, with the engineer remaining solely focused on the performance of the team and the car under his remit – there has been no pushback or bruised ego bickering as a result of Cowell’s changes.
Krack’s responsibilities also largely absorb those of long-time performance engineer Tom McCullough, who will move away from the F1 side of Aston Martin’s operations in order to take up a role in expanding Aston Martin’s Performance Technologies ventures in other racing categories.
More on Aston Martin and Lawrence Stroll
? Lawrence Stroll: How the Aston Martin F1 owner made his $3.9 billion fortune
? Who is Andy Cowell, Aston Martin’s new F1 team boss and CEO?
Why has Andy Cowell opted for the changes he’s made?
What’s clear from Cowell’s immediate actions after taking control of Aston Martin is that he has quickly identified the areas that weren’t working within the team’s hierarchy and is setting about changing them, based on his own nous as a manager first and foremost.
Given the rapid growth of Aston Martin – a team that boasted circa 400 employees as Racing Point five years ago – it’s perhaps unsurprising that the very first attempt at finding a perfect structure at the first time of asking after long-time leader Otmar Szafnauer’s departure in 2021 wasn’t the perfect solution.
With Cowell having now made his changes, a key challenge in 2025 will be in allowing Krack and Cardile to play to their respective strengths.
There are obvious questions to be answered – these leading figures are all engineers, while Newey, who is set to start work with Aston Martin on MondayMarch 3, is another high-profile engineering figurehead to be added into the mix.
Can all of them play together nicely?
“I think I remember Mercedes Grand Prix, pulling together a gaggle of impressive technical directors, and it working out okay on that run into 2014,” Cowell said.
“We’re quite a young organisation. Going all the way back to the Jordan days, it’s a couple of decades but the change to being a team that’s targeting being at the front and operating with that level of facility and resource is only recent.
“There are lots of things to do – whether it’s setting up our own wind tunnel and all the facilities that are required to do that, whether it’s making a gearbox to go on the back of the Honda power unit for 2026, simulation tools and getting those to be class-leading – there’s a huge amount of work to be done.
“If you’ve got senior leaders that can each take one of those big challenges and focus on it, then we’ll get to the front quicker.
“What I want to do is make the organisational changes that I think will help all of us going forward, so that there’s not only office space and a desk and a chair and a drawing board ready, but there’s also a structure that’s got their name in it.
“So my ambition is that their very first day in the factory is a working day, not reflecting and making change day. So I see that as my role as the CEO.”
Those first bold and brave steps as CEO have now been made, and it’s now a waiting game to see whether Aston Martin’s new structure flourishes. To use a culinary analogy, the ingredients of the team are now together, and Cowell’s recipe adjustment is going into the baking phase.
Speaking about what he discovered upon starting work at Aston Martin, he explained the approach he’s taken – moves that could define success in the near future for Stroll’s increasingly impressive squad.
“I think we’re disappointed where we are,” he said.
“Everybody is – I haven’t met anybody that’s living in a bubble of happiness thinking that we’re achieving greatness. It’s everywhere we need to get better.
“There isn’t a single area of the business that is saying to me, ‘We’re perfect. We’re ready to win championships’.
“Everywhere is saying, ‘Yeah, we could do this, that’s better. We’d like to do this’.
“This is our road map to get to a place where we think we’re great. So there isn’t a single area that is perfect yet, and we will probably never reach perfection because we’ll always come up with better ways to improve every single department of the business.
“My job is to create a team. In a team, everybody knows what their role is. They know their position on the pitch, and my job is to discuss with each of those players what they could do to get better.
“It’s not telling them. It’s just instilling a high-performing atmosphere of doing something, learning from that experience, and thinking of new ideas, and going again.”
Read next: Toyota provide huge F1 comeback hint with return under consideration