Formula 1

Adrian Newey's worst ever F1 car (isn't an Aston Martin) - plus the best terrible car in history

It could be worse. No, really!

Chris Deeley

Saturday 7 March 2026 12:55

There have been four F1 sessions run at the Australian Grand Prix so far this weekend.

Lance Stroll has completed a total of 16 laps.

It probably won’t cheer him up to hear that the AMR26 might not actually be the most disastrous car Adrian Newey’s ever designed.

Article continues under video

The news coming out of Aston Martin last month at pre-season testing in Bahrain was alarming. Newey’s first Aston, four seconds off the pace? The Honda engine not up to scratch, but the gearbox and aero designs not playing nicely either? It felt a bit more serious than the normal downplaying of pace, but surely nothing that wasn’t fixable for the great designer?

Then, this week, a new message. ‘Hey guys, we’ve got a car that our drivers think will permanently cripple them if they drive even half a race distance. Also, Honda sent most of their F1 people to work on solar panels or something (“solar panels or something” is a direct quote), and we didn’t find out until a couple of months ago. Oh, we’ve only got enough batteries for...well put it like this, if one of them goes, we’re only running one car. And, seriously, the car literally shakes itself apart on track’.

It’s one of the most staggering weeks a team has had in the modern F1 era. There’s only been one session all weekend in which both cars have completed laps. Hell, there’s only been one session all weekend in which both cars have started laps.

Remembering Newey's McLaren disaster

Things are bad. Things have been bad for Newey before. In fact last time, it was Red Bull leaving Renault to be rescued by Honda(!) that turned things around. But the Renault Red Bull years did not produce the worst F1 car he’s designed. That happened when he was still at McLaren.

It happened after this picture, but it's the only one in the gallery

Do you remember the MP4-18? Do you remember seeing it scuffle around at the back of races, fighting to not go a third or fourth lap down? Trick question! You don’t remember that, because the MP4-18 never even made it to an F1 race.

Intended to be McLaren’s 2003 challenger, the team admitted all the way back in November 2002 that they’d start the season with a pair of modified MP4-17s (their 2002 car) and bring out the new one mid-year. That wasn’t unheard of at the time – it wasn’t a big regulation change cycle, and reigning champs Ferrari were actually planning on doing the same thing.

Things swiftly devolved. The MP4-18 didn’t launch for testing until mid-May, by which point Ferrari’s new car was already racing and winning. The new McLaren was not racing (they were still running the MP4-17D at grands prix), and kept catching fire. When it didn’t catch fire, it crashed. It was an absolute nightmare to drive and work on, and by that time Newey wanted to completely redesign the chassis. At that point, the car was dead in the water.

The MP4-18 never raced in F1, although Newey still claims that the MP4-19 in 2004 was essentially a rebadged version of that essential design (with eight retirements in the first eight races, including three races where neither driver finished, that seems plausible).

Which is worse, a car that never arrives, or a car that arrives slow and shaking itself to pieces? In a vacuum, it’s the former. In the contexts of the McLaren and the new Aston, it’s definitely the latter. The MP4-18 was a disaster, but it was a survivable one because...well, McLaren had a car from the previous year. They finished third in the constructors’ championship in 2003, running that modified version of the old car.

Aston Martin, right now, do not have a fall-back car. It’s physically impossible to make a 2025 F1 car conform to the 2026 regulations. It’s this or nothing.

Of course, they’re not the only team in history to back themselves into a corner to start a season either.

The fastest bad car in F1 history

John Barnard changed the sport twice. Once in 1981, when he brought in the carbon fibre composite chassis with McLaren, then once in 1989, when he brought the sequential paddle-shift gearbox to Ferrari.

That experimental gearbox worked brilliantly with Ferrari’s V12 engine, but its lifespan was measured in laps. And the number of laps was usually about 30.

But...well, they could either try to get to the end of races with what they had, or they could just go home.

The ‘89 Ferrari, named the 640, produced one of the most remarkable seasons in the history of the sport. Nigel Mansell rocked up at Jacarepagua for the season-opening Brazilian Grand Prix, and later recounted in his autobiography that he had so little faith in the car lasting the full race distance that he’d booked a flight home on the assumption he’d be out of his seat and in the garage before half-distance.

The car kept running, long enough for Mansell to be cursing it from the cockpit. To paraphrase, ‘it’s not enough that you’re going to break on me, but you’ve waited just long enough that I’ll miss my flight too, you bastard you bastard you bastard’.

Possibly the only flat cap-wearing Ferrari driver

He did miss his flight, but the car actually made it to the end of the race. Not only did it make it to the end of the race, it did so in first place. Barnard’s gearbox, with its mayfly lifespan, had made the car brilliantly fast.

Was it actually a stroke of genius to build the car around that design? It was not. The car just kept breaking. Mansell failed to finish the next five races (including three retirements in a row for gearbox failures), then finished on the podium five races in a row (good!), and then...didn’t finish another race all season.

Things were even more stark for his teammate Gerhard Berger, who didn’t finish a race until September. One of his many, many DNF’s was actually down in the books as ‘gear fire’, which is as least a novel way of saying ‘gearbox bad’. He then finished second, first, and second again in a three race span before promptly going back to retiring from every remaining race that year.

The Ferrari 640 started 30 races in the 1989 season. It finished eight of them. When it did finish though, it finished on the podium every single time.

It’s probably the single weirdest season a team has ever had and – despite finishing barely 25% of its starts – it should be an aspirational case for Aston Martin. Make the thing fast first, and focus on making it finish later. 2027 can be your ‘Ferrari 1990’, when Alain Prost could (and possibly should) have won the drivers’ title in a suddenly more reliable car.

Y’know. If their drivers’ hands still work come the end of the year.

Ferrari McLaren Aston Martin Adrian Newey Nigel Mansell