– Otmar Szafnauer and Lawrence Stroll are unlikely to become friends anytime soon. In the podcast High Performance Racing, the former Aston Martin team principal has now explained what, in his opinion, has been going wrong in the team under owner Stroll for years.
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When asked how far back one has to go to understand the current problems at Aston Martin, Szafnauer answers: “I believe Lawrence has now been the owner of the team for eight years. I think you have to go back five years.”
If you do that, you end up in the 2021 season – which fittingly was Szafnauer’s last as Aston Martin team principal. At the beginning of 2022, he said goodbye at Silverstone, after having worked for the then Force India team since 2009.
But what exactly went wrong since Szafnauer’s departure? He himself explains: “In my opinion, the chaos arises because in Formula 1 people want to succeed too quickly. And if you want to succeed too quickly and are not patient, it leads to too high staff turnover.”
A clear accusation against Stroll, who took over the team in summer 2018 and renamed it Aston Martin for the 2021 season after a transitional phase as Racing Point. Since the racing team started in green, not only Szafnauer himself had to leave the team.
Just in the position of team principal, besides Szafnauer, Mike Krack and Andy Cowell were also replaced in the following years. Since the beginning of the year, Adrian Newey has been in charge. According to Szafnauer, this is a problem because the most successful teams in Formula 1 are “precisely those that are stable”.
Szafnauer: Newey needed five years at Red Bull
And this lack of stability is not only on the position of team principal. Another mistake Szafnauer mentions is, for example, the separation from Andrew Green, who also worked for the team since the Force India days but was replaced as Technical Director in 2021 by Dan Fallows.
Fallows himself has now also left Aston Martin again, but they hired Enrico Cardile from Ferrari and, of course, Newey after his departure from Red Bull. Szafnauer does not believe it is possible to be successful with such a high turnover.
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Photo gallery: All Aston Martin Formula 1 team principals
“I think nowadays there is no messiah anymore. It’s all about teamwork,” says the 61-year-old, who describes himself as “more patient” than Lawrence Stroll. As an example of how important stability in a team is, he names Mercedes or in the past also Red Bull.
He recalls that Newey came to Red Bull in 2006, but Sebastian Vettel only achieved the team’s first Grand Prix win in 2009. At that time, Newey had the best conditions there, among other things because there was no budget cap yet.
“And still, it took four years to win [a Grand Prix], and five years to win the championship,” says Szafnauer, who therefore explains that Newey must now be given a similar time at Aston Martin. But his predecessors did not get that.
Aston Martin chassis only average?
With only one point, Aston Martin currently ranks tenth and second to last in the 2026 Formula 1 season standings. Only newcomer Cadillac has not scored any points so far.
Recently in Hungary, the team made a leap forward with a large update package for the AMR26, and at the first Grand Prix after the summer break in Zandvoort, engine partner Honda wants to follow up with its own upgrade.
According to Szafnauer, even the best engine on the grid would not immediately bring Aston Martin to the front. He suspects that the AMR26 with a Mercedes power unit “might be a bit faster than the Alpines.” That would place them in the upper midfield.
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Regardless of engine partner Honda, Aston Martin would therefore not be able to fight at the very front in 2026 anyway, according to Szafnauer. And if personnel changes are made again in the foreseeable future, in his opinion, nothing will change about that.
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