Aston Martin is restructuring the engineering teams around Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll, The Race has learned, in a bid to ensure it is better set for the new 2026 regulations.
As team principal Adrian Newey pushes on with his efforts to get Aston Martin to the level he thinks it needs to be at, changes are being made to the crews on both sides of the garage.
The Silverstone-based squad is expanding its trackside engineering structure, with it believing that having more senior oversight across both cars will help it deliver better results.
On Alonso’s side, chief engineer trackside Chris Cronin is to take on additional responsibility as the Spaniard’s new senior race engineer.
Having previously been Alonso’s race engineer up until last year, he will become his point of contact on the team radio, and will work closely with Alonso’s current race engineer, Andrew Vizard.
A wider reshuffle is taking place on Stroll’s side of the garage, with his previous race engineer Gary Gannon stepping up to become senior race engineer.
Gannon is hugely experienced and became well known in F1 circles for his engineering role at Haas, where he worked with Nico Hulkenberg, Mick Schumacher and Romain Grosjean.
Stroll’s new race engineer for the 2026 season will be Stephen Glass, who originally joined the Silverstone-based team when it was Racing Point in 2019 and has most recently been a performance engineer.
The changes at Aston Martin come as the squad faces a race against time to get itself in competitive shape following a difficult start to testing.
It has had difficulties with its new AMR26, which only did minimal running in the first Barcelona test and struggled for pace in Bahrain last week.
The team knows that the start of the new year may be challenging, but it retains faith that it can make progress over the year.
Aston Martin chief trackside officer Mike Krack said: “We have a lot of work to do.
“We have a new car, a new package, new partners, and we need to integrate everything. That is a lot of work that is ahead of us, and we had to learn this week that we are not at the level as others are, maybe.
“But I think the package has potential, and we need to work hard to unleash it.”
