Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey believes his team have been on the "back foot" by around four months amid Formula One's biggest ever regulation changes.

Those changes are expected to lead to a potential shake-up in the pecking order, with Aston Martin tipped to be one of the biggest beneficiaries, with Newey – who helped create 15 championship-winning cars at Red Bull – the reason for that.

F1 teams have been able to work on the new cars since January last year, with the power unit side starting before that.

However, Newey did not begin working for Aston Martin until March, and their setbacks led to them being late for last week's testing session in Barcelona.

As such, Aston Martin completed just 65 laps, the fewest of the 10 teams that ran there, with Williams missing the entire event.

"The AMR Technology Campus is still evolving, the CoreWeave Wind Tunnel wasn't on song until April, and I only joined the team last March, so we've started from behind, in truth," Newey told Aston Martin's website.

"It's been a very compressed timescale and an extremely busy 10 months.

"The reality is that we didn't get a model of the '26 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April, whereas most, if not all of our rivals, would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year.

From pencil to pitlane. #AMR26 pic.twitter.com/sQM8Urwsyi

— Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team (@AstonMartinF1) January 29, 2026

"That put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle.

"The car only came together at the last minute, which is why we were fighting to make it to the Barcelona Shakedown."

When Aston Martin did make it to the grid, their car caught attention with its vastly different design, with aggressive bodywork to redirect airflow.

"I never look at any of my designs as aggressive," Newey added. "I just get on with things and pursue what we feel is the right direction.

"The direction we've taken could certainly be interpreted as aggressive.

"It's got quite a few features that haven't necessarily been done before. Does that make it aggressive? Possibly. Possibly not."