Aston Martin F1 team ramps up bid to secure Newey

Ferrari is facing an increasingly tough fight to secure Adrian Newey’s services after it emerged Aston Martin hosted the Formula 1 design legend for a secret factory visit.

Aston Martin has long been known to have been interested in Newey’s services, with Motorsport.com revealing back in March that its owner Lawrence Stroll had made a personal offer to him.

Now, as Newey weighs up what he plans to do next – amid a number of teams eager for him to join their projects – sources have revealed that he was hosted for a secret visit to Aston Martin’s Silverstone facility recently to see how the squad shapes up.

It has been suggested that Aston Martin’s staff were requested to vacate the factory for the duration of the visit in a bid to try to stop news about Newey’s visit being leaked out.

While Ferrari has long been a favourite for Newey, there have been doubts about whether or not he would be interested in the kind of upheaval that would be required for a commitment to the Maranello organisation.

Instead, a shift to have input from a British team would be more logical, and there appears no shortage of interested parties.

While Ferrari and Aston Martin have been the clear favourites to secure Newey’s services, sources suggest that McLaren and Mercedes are also pushing hard behind the scenes to get him on board – even though both squads in public have kept quiet about things and insist they are happy with their current technical line-ups. Williams too has openly tried to court him.

Aston Martin certainly has the ambition that Newey would like to see from a team, and a move there would lead to the renewal of a working relationship he had at Red Bull with its technical director Dan Fallows.

It would also open the door for a partnership with Fernando Alonso, a driver that Newey himself has talked about having had a desire to work with at some point in his career.

Speaking last year about the drivers he had hoped to design cars for, Newey said: “Working with Fernando and Lewis would have been fabulous. But it never happened. It’s just circumstance sometimes, that’s the way it is.”

Alonso himself also expressed hopes last year that he could do something with Newey in the future.

“He’s a legend of the sport,” reflected Alonso. “We’ve been very close a few times to working…