Red Bull loses another key ally as Aston Martin poaches key Adrian Newey aide

Aston Martin F1 team has reportedly hired former Red Bull head of simulation analysis and Adrian Newey's aide, Giles Wood, ahead of the 2026 season. The Silverstone-based outfit is leaving no stone unturned to get into championship contention next year as the sport heads into new engine and aero regulations.

After hiring some of the biggest names in F1 like Bob Bell, Enrico Cardille, Andy Cowell, and, more importantly, Adrian Newey, the iconic British brand has built a superteam to challenge in the 2026 season.

After previously poaching Newey and Dan Fallows from Red Bull, Aston Martin has gone for yet another of the Austrian team's key figures to bolster their aerodynamics department. As reported by Crash.net, the British team has hired Gilles Wood to work in their simulator department.

Wood has previously worked in F1 for McLaren from 2004 to 2006 and left the Woking-based outfit in 2007 for Red Bull, similar to Newey. At the Milton Keynes-based outfit, he revolutionized the simulator department of Red Bull and played a key role in their dominance from 2010 to 2013.

Wood was later promoted to Technical Director at Red Bull Advanced Technologies in 2014, but left the sport in 2017 to work for Apple. However, he has reportedly been convinced to return to F1 and join Adrian Newey at Aston Martin.

Adrian Newey cites some key areas of development for Aston Martin

Aston Martin's Managing Technical Partner, Adrian Newey, stated that the Silverstone-based outfit needed to work on the "loop simulator" for better correlation.

As per the BBC, the aero wizard had cited that the British team needed to fix some of their tools, saying:

“I think it is fair to say that some of our tools are weak, particularly the driver in the loop simulator. It needs a lot of work because it's not correlating at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool. Not having that is a limitation. But we've just got to work around it in the meantime and then sort out a plan to get it to where it needs to be. But that's probably a two-year project in truth.”

In his first few months at the team, Newey found:

"There are a lot of individually very, very good people. We just need to try to get them working together, perhaps in a slightly better organized way. That's simply a result of the roots of the team at Jordan, that became Force India, that became Racing Point, and was as such always a small but slightly over-performing team, to now in a very short space of time a very big team that the truth is has been underperforming this year."

Adrian Newey also has previous experience of working with the team's engine supplier, Honda, with whom he worked at Red Bull from 2019 to 2024.

Edited by Hitesh Nigam