By Joshua Robinson

SILVERSTONE, England -- The great irony of the world's fastest motor sport is that building a world champion never happens quickly.

You need designers with moonshot ideas, engineers with Ph.D.s, and a workforce of nearly 1,000 to keep the whole show on the road -- and that includes a pair of drivers who are prepared to risk life and limb to rip around circuits at 200 miles an hour. It takes many years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, for a new team to climb to the upper echelon of Formula One racing.

All of which makes the project unfolding at Aston Martin, here in the heartland of English motor racing, that much more dizzying. It isn't merely trying to become competitive, it's building an F1 superteam. And Lawrence Stroll, the Canadian billionaire who has controlled the Aston Martin F1 team since it entered the sport in 2021, is aggressively trying to shorten the usual timeline.

"My vision is extremely simple: to win, win, win," says Stroll. "That's why I took this project on."

Over the past two years, he has sent the team into overdrive. In 2023, Aston Martin opened a state-of-the-art, $250 million campus, including a factory and a wind tunnel that will allow engineers to do all of their aerodynamic testing in-house.

Then last year, the team overhauled its leadership by hiring in one of the most obvious, most effective ways in F1: It looked at the sport's two most recent dynasties and hired from there. First it picked former Mercedes engine expert Andy Cowell to head its team. Next it secured the services of one of the greatest designers F1 has known in Adrian Newey, the architect of a dozen F1 team championships at Williams, McLaren and most recently Red Bull. On top of that, the team added Ferrari's former technical director, Enrico Cardile.

"It makes it tremendously exciting," Cowell says. "I'm smiling inside at the journey that we're on."

Grabbing an opportunity

It remains a journey in progress. Aston Martin concedes that it doesn't expect to win much in 2025, if at all. Through five races this season, it ranks seventh out of 10 teams. And it probably won't be in the mix for a title in 2026 either. But the team is betting that a couple of down years are a small price to pay for being highly competitive in the medium term.

"As we all know, it's better to stay in the development phase for as long as possible, because you are gaining lap time," Cowell says. "The longer you are in the development phase, the more lap time you will save at the point of release."

The team also has reason to believe that its sparkling new facilities and imposing new collection of talent have been put in place at just the right time: Wholesale regulation changes are coming for the sport starting next season, affecting every major area of the car, from the chassis to the engine to the tires. Because major rule shifts always tend to shuffle the pack in this sport, these moments represent rare opportunities to steal a march on rival teams.

That's where a design genius such as Newey really earns his eight-figure annual paycheck. Newey is an expert at poring over regulations, picking up his pencil, and turning gray areas in the rules into competitive advantages. That's why nearly every team in the sport made a play for him when he announced last year that he was ready to leave Red Bull.

"Adrian is the GOAT [Greatest of All Time]," Stroll says. "He's the unicorn. There's no one like Adrian."

Impatience, with a caveat

The hard part was making sure that everything was in place for Newey to make an impact. When Stroll first invested in Aston Martin's predecessor, the outfit known as Racing Point, in 2018, it had roughly 350 employees and was buying ready-made engines from another team.

Today, Aston Martin has 1,000 staffers. It still gets its engines from Mercedes, but it will transition to an exclusive engine agreement with Honda starting next year. The advantage is that instead of using an engine designed to fit in someone else's chassis, the team will be able to design a whole harmonious package from scratch.

"It's an industry all about competitive ingenuity," Cowell says. "You need a creative, freethinking environment where people don't kill ideas with the phrase, 'We've tried that before.' "

At the same time, Aston Martin has worked on building up the commercial side of its team. It isn't shy about trading on the British cool of James Bond while also courting wealthy sponsors flexing their financial might through sports, such as Aramco, the state-owned oil giant from Saudi Arabia.

All of this is essential to keeping its two racing-green cars on the road in what is essentially a giant puzzle of resource allocation. F1 caps what teams can spend on design, development and operations during a given season at $135 million, meaning efficiency is paramount.

At Silverstone, Aston Martin has reimagined every part of its production line with that in mind. (Its workshops even have vending machines for tools and parts that act as a mechanism for keeping track of costs.) The result is that engineers and mechanics say that a custom part designed here can make its way through a string of production departments, land in someone's suitcase for a flight halfway around the world and be fitted to a car for a Grand Prix the very same week. And the message is always the same: No detail is too small to ignore.

"Whether it's a power unit, whether it's a race car, it's maths, it's physics, it's having ideas...and it's having robust methods and tools," Cowell says. "When we look at the stopwatch, and the stopwatch correlates with the [predicted] number from the factory, then that, for me, will be a success."

So he and Stroll keep reminding themselves that 2025 is about setting up the right processes to win two or three years down the road. This isn't a sport where a coach can change the tactics or the general manager can sign a player and win immediately. Simply having the best driver or the best car is never enough. You need both, and another thousand people behind them.

The maddening complexity of F1 means that even the quickest turnarounds are like preparing for a space launch.

"I'm the most impatient guy you'll ever meet in your life," Stroll says. "But this does take time."

Joshua Robinson is a Wall Street Journal editor in New York. Email him at joshua.robinson@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 30, 2025 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

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