The Race F1 Podcast · The Race Media Ltd

Adrian Newey and the fine line between triumph and disaster - The Undercut with Damon Hill and Mark Hughes

April 4, 2026·42 min·3 clips

Frank Williams called Newey 'the most competitive human being I've ever encountered,' yet face-to-face he is mild-mannered and copes with catastrophe by finding its funny side.

Aston Martin is where the pressure lands first. The host treats Newey's current trouble as a familiar bargain: big aerodynamic ideas can move a team forward, but they can also drag it past what the rest of the car operation can support. Hill goes back to Williams and says Newey helped pull him there, because the March car had already pointed Formula One design somewhere different. Before that, he says, too many cars were basically boxes. Newey saw carbon fibre chassis as surfaces that could shape air, not just tubs with wings attached. That is the triumph side. The messy side comes when the team is living right on the edge before the idea has settled. Honda makes the Aston Martin problem harder. Hughes and Hill describe a gap left after Honda stepped back and Formula One people were moved elsewhere. If the return is going to work quickly, corporate Honda has to care enough to stop it becoming embarrassing. The panel keeps coming back to the same Honda habit: come in, leave, come back, and still bring real capability with plenty of volatility. Red Bull is the useful comparison. Newey and Christian Horner were fed up enough with Renault that Honda became serious, serious enough to pull Newey away from designing yachts. Nobody calls Aston Martin doomed. The tone is more careful than that. But they do treat the power-unit and engineering reset as a proper test. When asked whether it is a black hole or a supernova, they pick supernova, then give it until the end of the season to show some light.

As heard by us

A sharp Newey discussion about risk, Honda pressure and whether Aston Martin is headed for a black hole or a supernova.

Adrian Newey's Aston Martin headaches give Damon Hill and Mark Hughes a way into the old Newey bargain: the same appetite for pushing design beyond settled knowledge can make a car look revolutionary or leave a team exposed.

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Why you'd press play

You want the clearest read on why Adrian Newey's fine line still matters.

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