The Aston Martin Aramo F1 Team is increasingly manufacturing components in-house rather than outsourcing them.
It is a shift Team Principal Adrian Newey says is delivering greater control over quality as well as budget – solving some of the issues that have defined a difficult season.
Aston has scored a single championship point all year and its new power unit partnership with Honda has yet to deliver a clean race weekend.
A major car upgrade, due in Hungary, is being pitched internally as the moment the team’s fortunes begin to turn.
Some of the problems are much deeper-rooted than a sturggle with a new engine partner, what Newey found when he took office was a set of internal systems that had not kept pace with the team’s ambitions.
“We were relying on tools and processes that had been patched and bodged for years,” he told the team’s UNDERCUT interview series.
“You could trace some of them right back to the very early days of the Jordan team that was based here in Silverstone, long before Aston Martin returned to the grid.
“The result was a very frustrating car build. Parts weren’t being ordered at the right time – not because people weren’t doing their jobs, but because the underlying system was failing them.”
Under F1’s cost cap regulations, teams face a hard ceiling on what they can spend on car development each season, making the balance between outsourcing and in-house production a direct financial decision rather than purely an operational one.
Greater in-house manufacturing capacity gives teams more control over per-unit costs and reduces exposure to external supplier pricing, though it requires upfront capital investment in facilities and tooling.
The gearbox casing is now manufactured at the AMR Technology Campus, along with the floor patterns and floors themselves, with a significant number of other parts previously outsourced now produced internally.
We were relying on tools and processes that had been patched and bodged for years…the result was a very frustrating car build.
Adrian Newey
“That gives us better cost control, but more importantly, much greater flexibility and control over our own destiny,” explained Newey.
“Bringing more work in-house gives us better quality control, better responsiveness and a tighter feedback loop from research to design to manufacture.”
According to Newey, the wider operational rebuild was a deliberate response to the season’s early struggles rather than a reactive fix.
“We’ve taken this difficult spell as an opportunity to overhaul how we work,” he said.
“We’re making big strides in our in-house facilities and production capabilities. You won’t see all the gains immediately, but they’ll be visible on the updated car.
“We plan to introduce our upgrade in Hungary on both cars. We’re predicting a large step, but I’m reluctant to put specific numbers out there because our simulation tools aren’t yet as sophisticated or well correlated as they need to be.”
