Cowell takes team principal role in Aston Martin F1 team restructure

Aston Martin has shaken up its team management structure with Andy Cowell appointed team principal, replacing Mike Krack who has been given the title of chief trackside officer after just under three years in his previous position.

It will be a busy January for those charged with etching job titles into the frosted glass of the office doors in Aston Martin’s newly built Silverstone campus. Former Mercedes High Performance Powertrains boss Cowell, recruited as group chief operation officer to replace Martin Whitmarsh last October, has added the team principal role to his portfolio with immediate effect.

“To deliver the best race car performance, the team’s Aerodynamics, Engineering and Performance Departments have evolved to become separate, dedicated trackside and AMR Technology Campus-based teams with both reporting into Andy,” said a team statement.

Enrico Cardile, headhunted from Ferrari as chief technical officer, will take charge of factory-based development when his period of gardening leave ends.

“The AMR Technology Campus-based team will be spearheaded by the team’s new Chief Technical Officer, Enrico Cardile, with a team that can now focus 100% of its time on the competitive ingenuity challenge of creating a new race car,” said the Aston Martin statement. “Enrico will oversee the architecture, design and build of new race cars.”

While the grammatically uncertain cocktail of nouns and adjectives in this sentence renders it unclear what has actually changed on the factory side, it is known that Adrian Newey, who will carry the title ‘managing technical partner’ on his business card, prefers to dip in and out of affairs where he sees himself as giving most value rather than having a set 9-5 structure.

In a previous management reorganisation Dan Fallows, poached from Red Bull as technical director in 2022, departed last November.

Also unclear is the future mandate of performance director Tom McCullough, who will “remain in the Group in a leadership position”. McCullough has been with the team for over a decade and through three incarnations, having joined from Sauber in 2014 when the Silverstone squad was known as Force India. It is understood he will superintend Aston Martin’s other racing activities.

Since McCullough’s job was to maximise car performance trackside, this role has been superseded by Krack’s new position.

“I have spent the last three months understanding and assessing our performance,” said Cowell, “and I’ve been incredibly impressed by the dedication, commitment and hard work of this team.

“With the completion of the AMR Technology Campus and our transition in 2026 to a full works team, alongside our strategic partners Honda and Aramco, we are on a journey to becoming a Championship-winning team.

“These organisational changes are a natural evolution of the multi-year plans that we have scheduled to make and I’m incredibly excited about the future.”