- Windsor says Newey may have made the same Honda mistake that hurt McLaren.
- Aston Martin’s problems expose how little they knew about Honda’s real position.
- Late scramble has left Newey, Honda and Aston Martin under heavy pressure.
Former F1 team manager Peter Windsor has questioned Adrian Newey and Aston Martin’s handling of its Honda works deal after a poor start to the 2026 Formula 1 season.
Speaking in a conversation with YouTuber Cameron, Windsor argued that Aston Martin failed to keep close enough watch on Honda’s engine project in Japan from the start. He said that mistake echoed the one McLaren made when it returned to Honda in 2015.
The criticism lands at a bad time for Aston Martin. Newey joined the team in March 2025 as the centrepiece of Lawrence Stroll’s push to turn Aston Martin into a title contender.
Aston Martin also entered a new rules era with Honda as its exclusive works engine supplier, but the early results have been grim. The AMR26 has lacked power, while vibration from the internal combustion engine has damaged the chassis and battery pack and hurt both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.
In Melbourne, Newey said Alonso feared he could suffer lasting nerve damage in his hands if he drove more than 25 laps in a row.
That admission gave Windsor’s argument even more force. His point was simple: a team cannot treat a Honda deal as something that will run itself, especially at the start of a new engine era.
Windsor’s argument: Learn from McLaren’s mistake
Windsor laid out a detailed case for why Aston Martin, and Newey specifically, may have repeated a mistake that McLaren made when they reunited with Honda for the 2015 season.
His argument was not simply about technical competence. It was about oversight, presence, and the cultural understanding required to make a works partnership with a Japanese manufacturer actually function.
“McLaren made a massive mistake when they went back to Honda and just assumed that Honda, in Japan, would get on and build a brilliant engine and took their eye off the ball,” Windsor said.
He then turned the question directly toward Newey:
“Wouldn’t you have learned from that and made sure that you’ve got your people in Japan, the minute you’ve done your deal with Honda? Isn’t that what you do?”
Windsor went further, painting a clear picture of the kind of hands-on, immersive approach he believed should have been taken from the very beginning.
“And equally, from Adrian’s point of view, wouldn’t you be saying, ‘I am on the next flight out there, Lawrence, can I borrow your plane please. I want to fly straight to Japan, and I want to set up an apartment there, and I want a translator… And I am going to make sure we get a second base there because I want Honda to feel that we’re right on their doorstep. Any issue they have, I wanna know about it the minute it happens.'”
He extended the criticism to Cowell as well: “Isn’t this what you’d be saying? Why wouldn’t Adrian have delegated Andy Cowell to go to Japan for six months and just make sure that they were on track? Why wouldn’t you do that?”
The McLaren-Honda cautionary tale
Windsor pointed to McLaren’s failed Honda reunion in 2015 because it remains one of Formula 1’s clearest warnings about what can go wrong in this kind of partnership.
Honda’s first season back with McLaren was poor enough to damage confidence on both sides and stain the project from the start. The relationship never fully recovered.
Former McLaren racing director Eric Boullier later recalled visiting Honda’s Sakura base in Japan and being alarmed by the lack of progress. Honda had started work on its hybrid turbo engine at the end of 2012, while Mercedes had begun much earlier, in 2009.
McLaren and Honda also struggled with a gap in how they worked together. There were signs of weak communication and little real openness between the two sides.
Years later, Honda found a much more open working style with Toro Rosso, and that helped rebuild trust and lift performance.
The McLaren project also suffered from Honda’s lack of experience under the new rules and from McLaren’s own “size zero” chassis concept, which squeezed packaging too hard.
McLaren had also pushed Honda to return a year earlier than first planned. Those details matter now because Aston Martin’s current trouble has started to look uncomfortably similar.
What Adrian Newey and the team found, and when
Newey had earlier said that he, Lawrence Stroll and Andy Cowell went to Tokyo in November of 2025 after hearing fears that Honda would miss its original power target for the first race.
Only then did they learn how much had changed inside Honda.
What they found shocked them. The senior Honda group that had helped power Red Bull to multiple championships was largely gone after Honda first chose to quit Formula 1 in 2021.
After that exit decision, many experienced engineers left. Honda then shifted into a period of maintaining Red Bull’s powertrain rather than building at full speed for a fresh fight, especially once the FIA froze engine development from 2022.
By the time Aston Martin checked closely, the Sakura operation was no longer the one many in Formula 1 thought they were getting.
That November trip changed Aston Martin’s structure. Cowell was sent at once to work with Honda’s engineers. Newey was moved into the team principal role.
Honda F1 project general manager Satoshi Tsunoda later said that since Newey joined Aston Martin in March 2025, almost everything had changed, including how the power unit linked with the car body and other parts.
Windsor’s point is that all of this came far too late. He believes Aston Martin should have known the state of Honda’s program from the first day of the deal, not after warning signs appeared late in 2025.
Where Aston Martin stands now
Aston Martin is now looking at ways to steady the project. The team is trying to bring in Jonathan Wheatley as team principal, which would free Newey to focus more on the car.
Newey’s current role was always seen as a stopgap, though Aston Martin still views him as the key figure in Lawrence Stroll’s wider plan.
A team spokesperson said Newey remains both team principal and managing technical partner. That keeps him at the centre of the rebuild. It also means the pressure around his decisions will only grow if Aston Martin cannot fix the car fast.
The season is still young, and Honda has recovered from bad starts before. Its revival with Toro Rosso and then Red Bull from 2018 through 2021 showed that the company can improve when the working ties are strong.
Still, Windsor’s warning is hard to ignore. He is not just revisiting an old failure. He is saying Aston Martin may have walked into the same trap as McLaren, even with Adrian Newey, one of the most accomplished figures in F1, leading the project.
