Adrian Newey, now leading the Aston Martin Formula 1 team into 2026 as team principal, has commented on the use of AI in how the outfit operates. This comes after the Silverstone squad showed off its impressive-looking AMR26 in the private Barcelona testing last week.

With the 2026 regulations demanding plenty from the teams with changes to aerodynamics, chassis and power unit, development through machine learning and similar techniques will be used by all teams. These techniques are especially important now due to the lack of real-world running before the season start, and will continue to be as the cars develop quickly over the first year.

In fact, Lance Stroll's first day of testing amounted to only a "handful" of laps being completed. Two-time champion Fernando Alonso banked 61 laps across the Friday. More testing will come later this month in Bahrain from 11 February.

This use of AI doesn't come in the form of ChatGPT or any other consumer chatbots. It instead comes in the shape of complex and specialist packages - something that has been used for years before anything like this was released to the consumer market. 

"Machine learning has been around for a long time," Newey said in the team's Undercutinterview. "It's been superseded, if you like, as a buzzword by AI – everyone knows what AI is now. In truth, the AI that most people are using day to day is mainly just internet search-based and it’s pattern recognition."

He continues, explaining the team's usage: "What we are using machine learning, or AI, for is much more specific tasks and therefore how we use that AI is incredibly tailored.

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin

"We're typically not using anything off the internet because we are too specialised for that, but there are instances of using pattern recognition to help with relatively simple tasks and even race strategy through simulation and game theory."

He added: "There are more advanced applications... which I'd rather not talk about at the moment. 

"The thing about things like compute power, data processing, artificial intelligence, is it's all advancing so rapidly. What's new now will be pretty much out of date in 12 months.

"It's obviously incredibly exciting for us, and it's up to us to work with our partners to keep up with that because the opportunities it creates are absolutely immense. It's almost as if we have to keep reopening our minds to what's available, not on a daily basis, but certainly on a six-month basis, to take the most advantage as things evolve."

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Mercedes technical director James Allison has been surprised by the reliability of the new regulation cars at the private testing in Barcelona.

The 2026 Formula 1 season marks the start of a new regulation era in the championship. Included in the major regulations overhaul are a power unit with a 50:50 split between internal combustion and electric power, smaller and lighter cars, and active aerodynamics. 

To give teams more testing opportunities ahead of the season-opener in Australia from 6-8 March, private testing was held in Barcelona last week before Bahrain testing on 11-13 February and 18-20 February.

As he reflected on the testing during the live Mercedes launch event, Allison explained that he had expected the week at the Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya to be filled with red flags.

"I think the biggest thing that surprised us, and I'm guessing it's true also for our competitors, has been the really quite astonishing level of reliability that we've seen up and down the grid," Allison explained.

"With everything new as it is, I think it would have been reasonable to expect this first shakedown test to have been just a symphony of red flags and smoking vehicles, but that really hasn't happened.

"And in fact, for the most part, the reliability of these cars has been absolutely comparable, in some cases, better than last year's winter testing, with things that were far more mature, and which were very well understood.

"So that has definitely been a surprise to us, a welcome surprise, and I hope something that means that we can go into the new season, just concentrating on the racing, rather than trying to keep everything held together with baling wire and sticking tape."

The Barcelona shakedown was also the first opportunity that the teams had to check out the competition.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

"Well, intensely, of course," Allison said when asked how interested he was in the other teams. "Everybody spends the whole of the year or so it takes to design and build these cars, working in a vacuum, absolutely focused on what you're doing, intensely caring about putting as much performance as you possibly can into those cars.

"But knowing that up and down the land and abroad as well, there are other groups doing exactly the same, wrestling with the same challenge, and thinking about it probably differently to the way we are. And so when we do all emerge into the light, we just fall upon their designs to try to see what they may have found that we may have missed.

"And we take as many photos as we can, and then if we see something that is tricky to understand, we will put people on it until they do. If we see something that we think, 'Oh, crikey, we should have thought of that', then we'll start working on that as fast as we can.

"And just overall, we are completely shameless plagiarists, and the reason we're shameless is that we know all of our competitors are exactly the same. Part of the sport is doing what you can with the skills you have on your own. And then when you all come together, then working out what other people have done and trying to learn from them as well."

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