How Aston’s AI partner will help Adrian Newey build 2026 F1 car

Aston Martin’s 2026 Formula 1 challenger will be designed by Adrian Newey, we all know this.

We know that owner Lawrence Stroll pulled out all the stops to bring in the man with the magic pencil to deliver a car that can fight at the front of the grid. But Newey’s sketches, his notes and his ingenuity have all received a modern-day boost since the arrival of CoreWeave as the Aston Martin F1 team’s AI cloud partner – a multi-year deal that was announced around the Monaco Grand Prix.

Aston’s new wind-tunnel facility has been branded as part of the agreement with CoreWeave, which will be able to bring the latest in cutting-edge artificial intelligence to coexist alongside the work being done by Newey and his team.

“CoreWeave signed the partnership with the Aston Martin team to be the official AI Cloud Computing and Infrastructure partner, and very specifically to bring a new level of precision to car design, aerodynamics, how to think about the straight race strategy and analytics,” Coreweave chief marketing officer Jean English told Autosport.

“Then we are also doing the race side to make sure that we’ve got the real-time analytics coming in from the drivers, and we obviously have the ability for us to help move the team to an AI cloud, and that’s with the latest NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units) available on the market.

“We’re very excited about the partnership, the CoreWeave wind tunnel, and with Adrian now on board, it’s a perfect time for us to think about what can be powered by CoreWeave’s powerful AI capabilities.”

With Aston Martin investing millions in upgrading its Silverstone-based F1 campus, English explained just what CoreWeave can do to help the team get the best out of its improved facilities.

“We have a perfect alignment of the talent and technology, and now fierce ambitions together. When we had a shared vision, we thought of F1 as not just being a racing platform, but together we really saw it as providing the ground for high-performance AI engineering,” she said.

“You know, we are an AI cloud. We are purpose-built for AI. We are really focused on providing the speed, the performance, the reliability, the expertise that helps unleash AI’s full potential.

Aston Martin wind tunnel

Photo by: Aston Martin

“When it comes to the wind tunnel, part of what we’re focused on is making sure we provide the latest AI Cloud infrastructure. This AI Cloud infrastructure is really driving the aerodynamic predictions, hundreds of iterations of testing of all the car parts before they ever get the best version that will go in for the final testing.

“Every single layer is about speed. So it’s the speed of what we provide and the speed that ultimately then comes from the cars on the track.

“It’s a multi-year partnership, so we’ll continue to stay curious and to have bold ambitions together. I think it’s a fascinating time to be in F1 and be at the pinnacle of what can happen with AI. AI is not a futuristic concept. It is absolutely a fundamental tool to how to think about transforming F1.”

If CoreWeave can deliver on its plans and drive Newey’s concepts forward at pace, Aston Martin is set to be a formidable force in Formula 1 in the coming years.