Günther Steiner thinks Aston Martin made a wrong choice by promoting Adrian Newey to team principal. The Brit is at the helm of the British racing team for the first time this season, but so far, Fernando Alonso’s eighteenth place in Japan is the best result. According to Steiner, Aston Martin’s choice of Newey as team principal shows that ‘you should always deploy people in the area where their strengths lie.’
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Adrian Newey is at the helm of Aston Martin for the first time this year and had certainly hoped for a different start to the season as the new team principal. The drivers – Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll – have failed to finish five times due to problems with the AMR26, leaving the team in last place in the constructors’ championship.
Former Haas team principal Günther Steiner wonders if Aston Martin made the wrong choice by promoting Newey to team principal. “I think if you asked Adrian, he would say: ‘I don’t know why I did this or why I agreed to it’,” Steiner even says in the Drive to Wynn podcast. “I don’t know how it came about, or whether he wanted to be team principal or not, but he clearly isn’t in the right place.”
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‘Never just give a promotion’
According to Steiner, Newey would have been better off sticking to designing Aston Martin cars. “He is very good at what he does, namely designing cars – not the Aston Martin at the moment, of course, but he will fix it,” believes the former team principal. “I think it was something typically Adrian: ‘I have to be team principal,’ without knowing what all being a team principal entails. It shows that you should always deploy people in the area where their strengths lie, and never just give them too high a promotion.”
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