Aston Martin's England captain blunder with Adrian Newey and why disaster awaits

A good thing to come out of Formula 1 recently is at no greater point than before now did I think that I had the ability to make the biggest calls on the toughest decisions at the largest of companies.

Let me explain. If you have the world's best ever engineer on your payroll and you are working on an internal restructuring, what do you assign him to? Would you:

A) Give him free rein on all the engineering things us mere mortals have no clue about.

B) Throw him into another vital role where the skills required he is largely untested on.

I'll throw that vote to you in our GPFans poll at the bottom of the page. However, if you are Aston Martin you pull the 'Banter to the max LOL' lever and make Adrian Newey your new team principal.

Why have Aston Martin made Adrian Newey team principal?

Now, I'll admit there is a reason I'm just a keyboard warrior and not top brass at an F1 team (or anywhere!), but try as I might I just cannot get my head around what on damn earth Aston Martin are playing at here.

Why would you give your most important engineer more responsibility in a role not fit for his best skills? It's an unnecessary gamble.

A prime example of how this can go wrong is the England cricket team (and we are very much in the season for sticking the boot into that lot.) Joe Root was by far England's best batsman before he replaced the retiring captain Alastair Cook in 2017.

Looking at the hard numbers there is good and bad from his 64 Test match tenure that ended in 2022. He has the record for the most Test matches as England captain, with the most wins and the most defeats.

But his batting average dipped from above 50 to below it, and during his captaincy England fell to a catastrophic run of just one Test win in 17 that would take its toll on him and team before he stood down. Since then his batting average is better than it has ever been.

So the point here is by giving one of a team's best contributors added responsibility in a foreign role, you can end up losing out in multiple metrics no matter the overall influence. Why take any engineering focus away from Newey when he is the best in the business?

But have Aston Martin tricked all of us?

Maybe there is something I don't know about Newey's skills. Maybe his work at Aston Martin since joining the team this year has marked him out perfectly for the TP role. After all Ross Brawn is evidence that engineers can not just make team principals but also be world champion winning ones too.

Then again, ask Toto Wolff what he thinks of Brawn's ability to run an F1 team and you may get a more negative response.

Some think this is smoke and mirrors to somehow shoehorn Christian Horner into the role in the future, and I can't completely ignore this, but I hope for their sake Aston Martin are playing 4D chess with us.

This is because it must be the most bizarre call a team has made since Williams sacked world champion elect Damon Hill in 1996 (yes, I'm still bitter about that.)

On the positive side, if Aston Martin can do things like this, what other fun can we expect in the future? Fernando Alonso doubling up as lead driver and team strategist? Lance Stroll becoming his own race engineer, maybe Christian Horner comes in as head of HR (maybe not). Do your thing Aston Martin!

READ MORE: Aston Martin issue emotional statement as star officially exits team

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