► The Rome that Stroll built
► Is this going to be F1’s new winning-machine
► We venture inside…
Welcome to the most recently completed of three sleek buildings on the Aston Martin Formula One Team campus. More secretive than the other two, it’s furthest from prying eyes and has fewer windows. And it’s called Building Three. Clearly when you’re spending hundreds of millions, chasing thousandths and laying the foundations for a trophy-rich dynasty, there’s no time to sit around brainstorming cute building names.
Deep in Building Three’s bowels, at ground level but with no views of the grounds or countryside beyond, the ambience is more outer space than just outside Silverstone. In the relative gloom, certainly when you walk here directly from the bright-as-day car-build bays next door, faintly sinister rows of expensive machinery hum as they work.
They’re busy batch-printing resin parts for the 60% wind tunnel model. Since the process is like building a full-sized skyscraper in Lego, one tiny layer at a time, it is not fast – the display on one indicates it’ll be finished the day after tomorrow. Others, their windows periodically flashing a ghoulish green, are printing parts of unfathomably elaborate design from powdered aluminium or titanium. AMF1 is more than a customer for these machines – its competitive hunger to push limits has put it right at the vanguard of the technology, along with NASA. After all, why burn fuel taking a full set of spanners into space when you can print the one you need up there?
Upstairs somewhere, one of the facility’s prize assets – its new wind tunnel – is undergoing final checks. Previously, the team used Mercedes-AMG’s tunnel when Mercedes-AMG weren’t (so, evenings and weekends) and wore grooves in a nine-mile stretch of the A43 as a consequence. Elsewhere on the campus, the greatest car designer the sport has ever seen, Adrian Newey, stands at the world’s most famous drawing board. After 18 riotously successful years with Red Bull, he started at Aston Martin a couple of weeks ago. His office – a glass lighthouse of experience and creativity in a sea of CAD monitors and furrowed brows – feels as much a display case for this talismanic hire as a place of work.
Just down the corridor, behind closed doors, sits another state-of-the-art piece of equipment, AMF1’s new driver-in-the-loop simulator (as opposed to a simulator without a driver, which is also a thing). Unseen, servers run warm as Aston engineers collaborate with those of Honda Motor Company and HRC half a world away. The Japanese company, creator of some of the finest and fiercest engines the sport has ever seen, will be AMF1’s powertrain partner for the sport’s new-regulation era, arriving 2026. And outside, amid beautiful planting and grasses that sway artfully in the stiff spring breeze, there’s a helipad – a helipad that, once a week, receives the man driving this revolution. Welcome to the Aston Martin Formula One team campus, the Rome that Lawrence Stroll is building.
Organisations often talk about being more than the sum of their parts. As of right now, if this team were anything like the sum of its parts it’d win every race it entered. Its facilities are state of the art. Its recent hires read like an F1 super group, from the aforementioned Newey through ex-Ferrari aerodynamics man Enrico Cardile and former Mercedes AMG powertrain guru Andy Cowell, who joined as group CEO and was recently appointed team principal, too. Its title sponsor Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s majority state-owned gas and oil company, isn’t short of funds. And on the power unit side, Honda will replace current supplier Mercedes-AMG from 2026. Honda power units have won the last four drivers’ championships and two of the last three constructors’ titles.
This team, which began life as plucky underdogs Jordan more than 35 years ago, stands poised to dominate a sport transformed out of all recognition. An insular personal playset when Bernie Ecclestone relinquished control nearly a decade ago, the sport has since conquered Netflix, hijacked the global news agenda on Premier League transfer deadline day (Lewis Hamilton to Ferrari!) and made the teams that contest it wealthier in the process. If AMF1 can become serial winners it’ll be the result of an acquisition of excellence so clear-eyed and uncompromising it’d make Pep Guardiola blush. And if it happens it’ll be because the team – with Andy Cowell at its core – managed to tune this campus, this engine of a thousand people and an awful lot of raw talent, into a winning machine.
You can’t point to a single aspect of what we’re doing here as pivotal, and that’s the whole point,’ Cowell tells CAR. ‘It’s a union of all of these things, and it stems from Lawrence’s vision for the team.’ (A consortium led by billionaire Canadian businessman Lawrence Stroll bought Force India’s assets in 2018, establishing the Racing Point team that then re-branded as Aston Martin when Stroll became part-owner and executive chairman of the car company.)
‘He came in and said, “I want this team to win. I want this team to get to the front,” and he’s taken the time to speak to people and understand what’s required. So, the wind tunnel. The driver-in-the loop simulator. A significantly bigger factory. Works team status, a partnership with Honda and developing our own transmission [because F1 gearboxes are fundamental to both the car’s aerodynamics and its rear suspension layout, designing your own is essential for a works team with title aspirations]. Bringing together a larger group of people as we transition from surviving customer team to works entity, in which we create everything ourselves. It’s all here. Now it’s about bringing it all together efficiently and effectively.’
Cowell was a part of Mercedes as it geared up to dominate F1’s first hybrid era, which started with the 2014 season. Does being a part of this team now feel anything like being a part of Mercedes AMG then? Is there a familiarity to this calm before the storm of champagne and championship wins?
‘It comes down to the vision. At Mercedes that was “the best or nothing” – that was our approach,’ he says. ‘It took a few years to embed, but you could see that by the middle of 2013 [when Cowell was Managing Director of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains] Mercedes were capable of winning races. The new power unit [in 2014] provided a step, as did the aero changes that came with it. Then there was just a determination to stay there – that even though we were at the front, we wanted to keep winning.
‘Here the job is to instil the same focus. If our performance improvement over time is greater than our opponents, then we’ll overtake them. And if we can keep our gradient of improvement over time greater than our opponents, we’ll stay ahead of them. For every department, whether it’s communications or HR or vehicle dynamics or aerodynamics, it’s about an obsessive approach to improvement, and how quickly we can go from today’s situation to what we’ve defined as a great place to be in a robust, controlled way.’
Winning is not something this team, in its various guises, has done much of. As Aston Martin it has scored podiums but remains without a race victory, let alone a title. Its most successful eras were arguably as Racing Point, when Sergio Perez won the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix, and as Jordan, when the irrepressible Eddie oversaw semi-regular flirtations with front-winning – and even title-chasing – pace.
For those who remember the name Jordan above the door (not to mention Force India, Spyker, Midlands and the rest), the Stroll era feels like a very pleasant dream from which they’d really rather not wake up.
‘The old days were a lot of fun, no doubt about it,’ says Mark Gray, head of build and car assembly. ‘There were fewer races in the season but if anything we were away more; it was like going on holiday with the team. I did 18 years trackside, having joined Jordan in 2003, but what’s happening now is really exciting. Technically the cars today are incredible and Lawrence’s investment – this era – feels different. Previous owners had similar ambitions, but they weren’t necessarily realistic. Lawrence’s approach has been: “What do you need?” For us it almost required a mindset shift. No one had ever asked us that before because we didn’t have the money. Suddenly it’s like, “Right, what do we need?” And what you see here – the autoclave and five-axis CNC milling big enough to accommodate a full chassis [before the £1.2 million investment in this room-sized CNC machine, the team had to out-source the job], the wind tunnel, the gearbox department, the additive manufacturing – is the result of that. And he cares. He’s here every week and he hates it when we don’t do well. But he’s realistic too. He knows success doesn’t come overnight.’
The team’s former home is gone, its footprint buried beneath Building Two. And with its demise came the chance to create the perfect F1 facility from scratch. Previously the team operated in a state of high-functioning semi-chaos, the machining department the noisy, messy hub around which the rest of the operation grew up in an ad hoc fashion. It also had myriad storage buildings and workshops scattered across the county, not to mention a reliance on third parties for access to equipment and techniques the team couldn’t afford.
Impressive on arrival, the new campus has the quiet calm of something high-performance and purpose-built, appropriately, and it feels like an Aston Martin space. Outside, the monolithic branding – divided diagonally into light and shade by the shadow of the building at noon – is both bold and beautiful. VIP parking teems with DB12s, visitors walk past a DBX on display behind reception and the hand sanitiser smells exquisite.
Free-ish to roam (Mr Newey is understandably busy, the wind tunnel and sim are off-limits and if we photograph anything sensitive 1000 people will get upset), you’re struck by the light, the space and the absence of that machine-oil aroma synonymous with traditional automotive manufacturing. A wide, ground-level boulevard – The Street – runs the length of Buildings One and Two, and your direction of travel along it from reception broadly mirrors the process by which a car is created: composites, machining, quality control, inventory and assembly and, finally, the build bays.
Beyond those there’s the finest gym you’ve ever seen and of course Building Three. On the first floor you’ll find offices, the biggest of which is occupied by the design team, a coffee shop, mission control (we visit ahead of the first race of the season and mission control’s already running on Australian time in anticipation) and that bleeding-edge simulator. Outside, you’re struck by the beauty of the setting – with 72,000m2 of wild meadow, 10,000m2 of immaculate lawn and more than 1500 trees, it’s easy on the eye.
So, too, is almost everything you find inside. In assembly, a Brembo front brake caliper stops me in my tracks. It’s being bled on a workbench; a complicated, multi-stage process thanks to the intricacies of its internal passages. Once complete (reaching a target pressure is confirmation all the air is gone), QD couplings allow it to be packed away ready for use already pressurised, saving the race team mechanics precious time later. Machined from a single billet of titanium, its bewitching beauty is as much about the blank spaces the elaborate form frames as the metal that’s actually there. Covered in cooling vents, fins, blades and tips, there’s barely a flat surface on it. Capable of withstanding temperatures in excess of 1000°C and unimaginable forces, it weighs just 2.5kg.
The build bays are empty, the cars that took shape within them already in Melbourne for the first race of the reason. There, results will be mixed. Drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll qualify P12 and P13. The rain-affected race is a nerve-shredder, and the kind of conditions in you’d normally back the hugely experienced Spaniard to succeed. Instead he smears his Aston down one of Albert Park’s crash-ravaged walls and into retirement, and it’s Stroll who keeps his head to claim a fine sixth place.
Disappointing, perhaps, given the level the team’s striving for, but Cowell’s quick to dismiss any suggestion the team’s driver pairing is a weakness (both drivers are contracted until the end of the 2026 season – whether they’ll be in green for 2027, the season in which you get the sense the team believes it’ll be right at the sharp end, remains to be seen). Can Aston win both titles with Alonso and Stroll? ‘Yes. The challenge is making the race car quicker. When you look at the lap time we need to gain through this year in order to win races and win the championship it’s car performance, not driver.’
He’s also positive about the direction of travel.’
‘Last year we won the championship in terms of the quantity of upgrades, but the quality of those upgrades wasn’t strong enough,’ he explains. ‘The idea generation and the confirmation of those ideas within the factory wasn’t robust enough. You end up with so much information you can easily get lost. We’ve worked to simplify that; to get down to the core things that make a race car quicker. That way we can be sure we’ve got a valuable update before we press the figurative button, releasing the surface data to manufacturing, and robustly land performance at the track. That’s the thing I would say we struggled with last year.’
While managing technical partner Newey’s focus is firmly on the new regulations and 2026, Cowell’s confident he’ll help the team more effectively turn theoretical speed into actual lap time gains almost immediately.
‘Adrian understands the whole car, and he understands the feedback from the circuit and from the drivers,’ continues Cowell. ‘I believe he will bring great value in terms of translating what the drivers are saying, translating what the car is doing, into targets within the factory. My role is to pull a business together that enables the work that Adrian wants. His experience is incredible across many different regulation sets, and his competitiveness is tremendous – undimmed, I would say. I’ve just had lunch with him in the restaurant and he’s a very friendly, very warm guy. But there were a couple of things we talked about… it’s lifting the bar, you know? Setting a new level of expectation. There’s no ambiguity there and that’s great – it’s wonderful to have.’
A big part of the reason Newey’s in Aston Martin green is the team’s wind tunnel. Just one aspect of this carefully choreographed rapid expansion overseen by chief operating officer Ben Fitzgerald. ‘I know that he saw the tunnel before it was finished, and I understand it was a key part of his decision making,’ explains Ben. ‘Lawrence introduced me [to Adrian] as the king of upgrades, though that’s the operational king, of course. My contribution is getting the upgrades to the car as quickly as possible.’
Ben joined AMF1 in January 2023, when the head count was half the circa 1000 it is now. Efficiently accommodating this swelling workforce and its demands, together with facilitating the move from a procurement-based organisation to one that now makes 70% of its cars by volume (up from 40%, a leap from 80,000 manufactured parts per year to more like 250,000, reducing external spend by 30%) is Ben’s remit, and he loves it.
‘We’re one of the most operationally effective teams on the grid, albeit that’s not being translated into performance just yet, and a lot of that is down to this campus,’ explains Fitzgerald. ‘The first of these three buildings opened in May 2023, and we produced our first parts within 24 hours. But the planning began four years before that, in mid-2019. That’s when we really established what the future of this team was going to look like, and the role this building would play in that future.’
In total, with the three buildings across the campus, AMF1’s currently at about 400,000m2, having come from a building of 50,000m2. And with £200 million invested to date, it’s not done yet.
‘We are making huge steps forward as a team, but you’ve only got to consider what else is going on – the new partnerships, another set of regulations, more insourcing – to see the challenge. We make 70% of the car, okay, but there’s still a handsome sum to go at.’
There’s much Ben’s proud of, from the rich data pouring from the team’s simulator and wind tunnel to the building’s A+ energy rating and the beehives in the grounds that surround it. But it’s what the campus says about the team he’s most happy with.
‘This is the team’s home now. When we think about the past, that wasn’t so clear cut. This is our home, and the sheer brand presence when you come to this building is fantastic. It’s an emphatic statement of intent.’