Who is Andy Cowell, Aston Martin’s new F1 team boss and CEO?
Andy Cowell sees his role doubled up at Aston Martin, with his Group CEO position now added to with team principal duties.
Formula 1 has a new team boss on the grid for 2025, with Andy Cowell succeeding Mike Krack as team principal at the Aston Martin squad.
Cowell was only announced as joining Aston Martin in July 2024, with the British engineer stepping into his role as Group CEO – replacing the departing Martin Whitmarsh – in October 2024.
What is Andy Cowell’s background?
Cowell’s return to F1 after four years away from the sport between 2020 and ’24 has seen him rapidly rise back to prominence in just a few short months.
With Aston Martin confirming Mike Krack will step back into a trackside leadership role for F1 2025, Cowell has stepped into the role of team boss and CEO of the F1 team in his place. While no stranger to leadership roles, Cowell is nonetheless facing a new challenge in that he is taking responsibility for an F1 team as a whole, rather than the more specific roles he’s held in the past.
Prior to joining Aston Martin as Group CEO, Cowell’s most recent F1 experience was at Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains.
As Managing Director of the Brixworth facility, he was regarded as one of the cornerstones of Mercedes’ domination of Formula 1 between 2014 and ’20.
Cowell had succeeded Thomas Fuhr in this role, and spent 2013 working on the PU106A V6 – the first hybrid F1 engine from Brixworth, and the power unit which set the standard for years to come.
Such was the dominance of Mercedes’ engines, Mercedes’ former executive director Paddy Lowe revealed in 2021 that, during ’14, Mercedes had usually run their engines in a type of “idle” mode in order to disguise the true dominant performance available from the power unit – instead choosing to just dribble out sufficient power to remain at the front.
Under Cowell’s leadership, the Mercedes power unit proved the standard-bearer – only Ferrari’s power unit came close towards the end of the decade, before the Scuderia was forced to make changes to its engine architecture following an agreement being reached with the FIA over suspicions on how the Italian squad were operating their power units.
While the engine freeze of recent years has largely levelled the playing field when it comes to engines, Cowell’s ability to unlock the potential within the walls of HPP was proven year-on-year as Mercedes racked up 12 world titles in six years. Cowell’s engines delivered the Drivers’ Championship to Mercedes every year between 2014 and 2020.
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Leaving HPP in June 2020, Cowell was succeeded by Hywel Thomas, who carried on the momentum to lead another Mercedes title in 2021 as the Brackley-based squad wrapped up the Constructors’ Championship.
Prior to taking on the role of managing director, Cowell served as an engineering director for HPP from the middle of 2008. He oversaw the technical leadership of all Mercedes’ engine and powertrain projects – including the development of the KERS hybrid system.
This leadership of the V8 engine project stemmed back to 2004 when he joined HPP (then known as Ilmor) as the principal engineer of the FQ V10 engine. Powering McLaren in 2004 and ’05, Mercedes’ V10 pushed the limits of performance – often to the detriment of reliability – and ended the V10 era regarded as the most powerful in the sport as it tipped off the 1000bhp mark.
Indeed, sheer horsepower and Cowell seemed inextricably linked – his experience before joining Mercedes was with BMW Motorsport, which developed engines for Williams. At low-downforce, power-hungry circuits – such as Hockenheim and Monza – Williams was frequently the team to beat thanks to the P80 series of engines Cowell contributed to.
Cowell’s early F1 experience was working on the engineering group responsible for the Cosworth CR engines which powered Stewart (later Jaguar), Jordan, Arrows, and Minardi in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He had joined Cosworth as a college graduate following his studies in mechanical engineering.
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