Is Aston Martin Looking To Get Back Into F1?

According to multiple reports (Source 1, Source 2) Adrian Newey is getting into bed with Aston Martin and helping with the design of a new road car. For those of you who don’t know who Newey is, he’s the mastermind behind Red Bull F1 as their chief technical officer. Newey has been key in Red Bull Racing’s successes over the last 5-10 years, helping Sebastian Vettel win his 4 world titles. He is the only F1 designer to have won constructors’ championships with three different F1 teams; McLaren and Williams being the others. So this now begs the question, what will this car be like? No official announcement has been made about type or class, but Newey is attached to the project.

But there’s an even juicer question that stems from this new wrinkle in the auto space-time-continuum: will Aston Martin Return to F1 in any capacity? Aston Martin did field a car in F1 back in 1959 and 1960 called the DBR4 (pictured below) which didn’t fair so well only competing in 5 races with a best finish of 6th. Since then, nada. All this speculation is coming from Aston’s current Mercedes link and since Mercedes supplies engines to other teams, rumors are flying around about Aston coming back with a Merc power plant via RBR. This would effectively sever the Infinity partnership, of  course.

The Aston to F1 news is cool, but I think it’s unlikely to blossom into anything tangible and regardless of the outcome, it’s pretty great to know that the car-company-combos are alive and well (see: Subaru/Toyota for the BRZ/FRS/GT86 and Toyota/BMW for the upcoming Supra/Z4 replacement). The more car companies cross pollination, the more awesome stuff they can churn out in an ever constricting economy. All said and done, I hope it happens.