F1 champion admits getting caught with ‘sneak peek’ at Adrian Newey’s sacred notebook

Aston Martin

F1 champion admits getting caught with ‘sneak peek’ at Adrian Newey’s sacred notebook

Jenson Button won the 2009 world championship

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Thursday 19 March 2026 19:43

An F1 champion has admitted to trying to get a 'sneak peek' at design legend Adrian Newey's sacred notebook.

Newey is one of the greatest car designers of all time, with Newey-designed F1 cars having claimed 26 world championships across the years.

He's worked with the likes of McLaren, Williams and Red Bull, and is now at Aston Martin hoping to turn the team's fortunes around after a dismal few years.

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Following a 2023 season in which they claimed eight podiums, Aston Martin went backwards in 2024 and again in 2025, while the 2026 season has seen a disastrous start, as the team have not even managed to finish a race so far.

Newey is tasked with trying to turn the outfit into a championship-challenging team in the next few years, and his trusty notepad is one of the tools that he's using to do that.

The Brit could be seen stood next to Ferrari's SF-26 at the Australian Grand Prix scribbling down notes, and he is working hard to try and bring some upgrades to the AMR26 to boost them up the order.

Now, 2009 champion Jenson Button has revealed what it's like to see Newey's work up close, having recently become a team ambassador with the Silverstone-based outfit.

"Seeing Adrian operate up close is fascinating," Button told Aston Martin's official website. "He's very old school - notebook in hand, sketching ideas on a drawing board - but that's part of what makes him such a master. He really is.

"And yes, I may have tried to sneak a peek at his notebook... he noticed."

Can Aston Martin turn it around in 2026?

Aston Martin's new power unit partnership with Honda has been disastrous so far, with a lot of the team's problems stemming from the unreliability from their power unit.

Honda are working hard to fix this, while Newey and Aston Martin are reportedly looking to try and hire a full-time team principal, so that Newey can just focus on his car designing duties.

The team have some huge names within their team - including Newey and two-time world champion Fernando Alonso - and they have a new state-of-the-art facility in Silverstone for Newey to work in.

They also have a highly ambitious owner in Lawrence Stroll who seems to have ever deeper pockets when it comes to his F1 team.

But despite all of these pieces, Aston Martin can't seem to find the kind of winning formula that helped them to become a real threat in the sport in 2023, with Alonso only not adding to his 32 career race wins that year because of the brilliance of Max Verstappen and Newey's RB19 rocketship.

F1 Aston Martin Adrian Newey Chinese Grand Prix Jenson Button