Adrian Newey has ‘spotted something’ after intriguing F1 2026 rules comment

Hard at work designing Aston Martin’s race machine for the F1 2026 season, Adrian Newey has revealed that these new regulations no long seem quite as “prescriptive” to him as they did at first glance.

And former F1 driver turned pundit Damon Hill believes that’s a clear sign that Newey has spotted some areas where he can maximise car performance.

Has Adrian Newey “found something” in the F1 2026 regulations?

After what has felt like ages of talk and speculation, the reality of the F1 2026 regulatory set are already taking shape.

While we’re still nine months away from the first new cars hitting the track for official pre-season testing, Formula 1 teams are already hard at work designing and constructing the machines that they’ll hope can finish the year at the top of the leaderboards.

And one team with particularly high hopes is Aston Martin.

The team funded by Lawrence Stroll hasn’t had it easy these last few years. While the team looked strong at the start of the 2023 season, its performance has since slipped. This year, six races in, Fernando Alonso has failed to score a single point, and both drivers have stated there’s little left for them to do.

But Aston has been bolstering itself for a resurgence in 2026. It has invested heavily in its facilities, including a state-of-the-art, and it has been collecting some of the biggest names in the paddock to help kickstart a new era for the team.

One such name is Adrian Newey.

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Newey has established himself as a brilliant designer in his decades-long Formula 1 career, and it’s his innovative ideas and his ability to spy new ways of doing things that have enabled him to power teams like Red Bull Racing to ultra-dominant World Championships.

When Newey announced he would be departing Red Bull in 2024, all eyes were on who would secure his services — and Aston Martin emerged with his name on their contract.

Late on Tuesday evening, 1996 World Champion Damon Hill shared a clip of Newey on his Instagram Story with the caption, “Hmmm. He’s found something.”

The clip in question has to do with an interview Newey gave to Aston Martin’s official website, where he revealed that he has been hard at work scoping out the 2026 regulations with an eye for creative interpretation.

“My thoughts on the ’26 regulations are similar to what my thoughts were about the big regulation change for 2022: initially thinking the regulations were so prescriptive that there wasn’t much left here [for a designer],” he said.

“But then you start to drill into the detail and realise there’s more flexibility for innovation and different approaches than first meets the eye.

“We saw that at the start of 2022, with teams taking really quite different directions.

“Now, of course, four seasons on, they’ve largely converged, but initially that wasn’t the case.

“Variation between teams is great. It’s all a bit boring if the cars look identical and the only way you can tell them apart is the livery.

“I think there’s a high probability that in ’26 we’ll see something similar to ’22.

“There’s enough flexibility in the regulations, and I’m sure people will come up with different solutions.

“Some of those will be dropped over the first two or three years as teams start to converge.”

While that level of confidence could certainly be a front designed to rattle the competition, Damon Hill seems to feel there’s something genuine there.

We’ll just have to wait until the kick-off of the F1 2026 season to find out.

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