Following a poor start to the season and low expectations for the current season, British team Aston Martin is focusing on the AMR26 with the new regulations that will come into force in 2026. This season’s AMR25 has not been completely abandoned; some improvements will be made for the upcoming races, but it will also serve as a guinea pig to test things for next year, i.e., tests will be carried out to measure performance for the coming year. Therefore, the new parts that the current car receives may represent an improvement, but they may also make things worse, and that could end up being embarrassing.
Poor planning by Aston Martin
Aston Martin’s season is the result of poor planning: the significant changes made at Silverstone, where a new factory was opened, all the technological systems were changed, and new personnel were hired, have left the team with no time to develop a merely competitive car. The team knew that this was not going to be a good year, but they could not have imagined that it would turn out to be so disastrous, at least at the start.
Aston Martin is battling Sauber to avoid being the worst car on the grid. At the start of the year, the expectation was to be fighting for mid-table, but the reality has turned out to be very different. Now the team has little margin for error and no resources to get back on track, so the team is almost entirely focused on next season.
AMR25 updates
Despite this, and given the ridiculous start to the season, Aston Martin will bring improvements for the next three races, Imola, Monaco, and Spain. This was confirmed by Andy Cowell, Aston Martin’s chief engineer.
“We’re going to take some parts to Imola,” Cowell confirmed. ”We have to decide if it’s the right thing to do, but there will also be new things in Monaco and Barcelona. Some are related to the rule change on front wing stiffness.”
The performance of these parts is key to Aston Martin’s future. They are the first to be made on the new wind tunnel, and they hope they will bring performance improvements to get them out of the hole.
The AMR25, a laboratory for next season
But the reality is that these improvements, although they represent a step forward for the car, are unlikely to make a significant difference this season. The gap is huge, and it is difficult to make such a sudden change with a few simple updates. That is why Aston Martin has opted for a new strategy for this year, testing the new parts that will be part of next season’s AMR26. It is a way of optimizing next season’s car, and could also mean a performance boost for the current campaign.
“There are technologies designed for 2026 that we are going to test in the 2025 car. It’s the only way to validate things for the future: if it works in a race, it really works. So we’re going to use this car to test and refine tools in a still young team, which is now starting to use resources that the big teams have been exploiting for decades.”
Aston Martin will therefore seek to improve the AMR25 with parts designed for next year, which is Aston Martin’s real goal. The current season is already considered a lost cause, even if they manage to improve, as the improvement will, at best, allow them to fight for a few points in some races. However, they will be able to fine-tune the new tools to perfect next season’s car.