Whichever way you look at it, Adrian Newey taking up the reins at Aston Martin for 2026 and becoming its Formula 1 team principal is huge news.
Not just in the context of Newey's career - it's the first time the F1 design legend will have had such control, in status at the very least - but also for the person he's replacing, Andy Cowell, who'll relinquish his duties a little more than 12 months after taking them on.
And it comes with the 2026 rules reset - so often cited as Aston Martin's big chance at leaping up the F1 order - just a handful of months away.
Here's what our team make of this development:
A fresh interpretation of 'team principal'
Scott Mitchell-Malm
It seems a little odd to me that for Aston Martin's managing technical partner "to make full use of his creative and technical expertise" he needs to become team principal as well.
That quote is from Aston Martin executive chairman Lawrence Stroll. What was Aston Martin doing, or not doing, before that meant Newey's input was in any way restricted?
Given the suggestions that Newey and Cowell were not always seeing eye to eye, I infer from Stroll's comment that Newey was being met with resistance. And I would imagine little will really change with Newey being team principal beyond him gaining whatever missing percentage of autonomy he felt he was lacking before.
It's presumably at least partly symbolic, but makes it clear who is calling the shots and gives him a bit more control across the board.
There is no questioning Newey's track record on the technical side but that's not proof he will thrive supposedly leading an entire F1 team. So, pondering what kind of team principal Newey will be is interesting. Will he be trackside at most races? Is he more figurehead than day-to-day leader? Will he be facing the media?
This will surely mean a fresh interpretation of the team principal role, and no excuses for Newey (who clearly has Stroll's complete buy-in) shaping the team exactly as he wants - making this project even more of a test of Newey's influence than it was already going to be.
Is Newey's attention being diverted?
Jon Noble
Aston Martin's move to make Newey team principal is intriguing on many levels.
On the one hand, knowing the huge influence that Newey has at the squad, and him knowing what is needed to create a championship-winning team, it makes sense to give him the final say in what happens there.
After all, if you are Stroll and you are throwing your weight behind Newey's opinion on matters, then it is pointless having him report into a team boss who may not necessarily agree.
So it will be fascinating to see how Newey adapts to the role, and how a team in this era of F1 evolves under someone as immensely competitive as him.
However, what is not quite clear is whether Newey's step up of responsibilities means him taking attention off the main prize - which is guiding the design that Aston Martin hopes will take it to title glory.
Stroll talked about Newey's new role allowing him to "make full use of his creative and technical expertise". But a team principal's job involves a lot more than just the car.
Is Newey's time on HR responsibilities, fan zone appearances, media duties and board meetings going to deliver the best bang for buck when it comes to the advantage a team should get from having him on board?
There's a bigger-picture concern here
Samarth Kanal
Was this the plan all along? I doubt it.
If Aston Martin wanted Newey as team principal, it would have made him team principal when he signed up.
I don't know if Newey - F1's greatest designer - can hack it as team principal, but we'll find out. Well, we might find out. This could well be another stepping stone to bringing someone else into the fray - like Christian Horner.
There is a worry here, and one that could unfurl itself in the longer term, beyond 2027.
You can only bring in new managers so many times before it becomes clear that something isn't right at the team. Aston Martin isn't at that point, but it begs the question: If shake-up after shake-up doesn't work, then where does the problem lie?
It's an approach that evokes football team Tottenham Hotspur's agonising trend of sacking managers every few years and then wondering why the trophy cabinet is so bare.
If Newey doesn't manage to make this team a championship contender - or winner - in the near future, then there's a fundamental issue there.
This is unfathomable
Jack Benyon
Adrian Newey is the best Formula 1 car designer of my lifetime and may well go down as the best of all time once people have had some distance to properly get those rose-tinted spectacles on for a look at his career after the fact.
But this is an unfathomable move for me.
This team seems to be in what feels like a constant state of flux. It's great that it's invested enormously in its factory and is doing a lot behind the scenes to become one of F1's off-track leaders. But surely it needs a bit of stability at the top level?
Maybe Newey provides that. But at the risk of offending a man I admire so much for his accomplishments, he is 66 years old - 67 when next season starts - and has never held this role before.
Of course, he has the requisite knowledge to pull this off. But he'd be much better sticking to what he knows and allowing the team to have a crack at establishing a long-term answer to its revolving-door-policy where its team boss is concerned.
Underestimate Newey at your peril
Josh Suttill
At first I thought this was a baffling move but now I'm wondering if it's a quiet stroke of engineering genius.
After all, who is better placed to dish out engineering orders than the F1 design genius?
Think about Newey in comparison to a figure like Horner.
Who will give the better soundbites, rousing speeches, or know the right things to say to provoke rival teams? Horner for sure.
But who has the ultimate engineering understanding to steer a team towards success? Or the authority and experience to make engineering-led decisions, where everyone in the structure knows the leader has been there and done it?
That's someone the engineers and designers can truly respect, in a way that's worked brilliantly for Andrea Stella at McLaren.
Don't forget, few would have billed Stella as team principal material before he was given the shot there.
So let's give Newey a chance to do the same, even if he might end up wishing he had a Zak Brown to do some of the media duties.
A real test of everything else Newey's learned
Glenn Freeman
One thing we can take away from this: clearly Newey is not going to be designing a large portion of the first Aston Martin built to the new rules in 2026.
There's no way someone could be fully hands-on with car design and run the team, even if the bulk of the initial design work will have been done by now.
That's in line with how Newey often portrayed his involvement at Red Bull, where he would feed ideas and fresh perspectives into the day-to-day technical team, rather than be a fully-fledged part of that team.
Perhaps that's how it will continue to work at Aston Martin, with Newey remaining a somewhat distant (dare I say, part-time?) contributor on the design side, but now filling up the rest of his time with actually running the team.
It's got the potential to be a huge change, especially for someone who seemed to very carefully manage how much of his time was devoted to day-to-day F1 operations at Red Bull.
But he's seen inside a lot of successful F1 teams, and worked closely with some of the most successful team bosses of all-time. Now we get to find out how much he's picked up along the way.
A box-office move
Sam Smith
This is as box office as box office gets for F1.
While the headlines it will create will concentrate on the stardust element that Newey has brought to every team he has served, you can't help but think what the capacity of the man himself is in what will essentially be a majorly time-consuming, two-pronged existence in one of the world's most high-pressured sports.
It's not just that he will be 67 years of age this coming Boxing Day, but it's also the simple practicalities of how Newey's technical focus can co-exist with the day-to-day machinations of team principal decision making. As an example, when does he and how does he make a call on one of the biggest elephants in the Aston Martin room: the future of Lance Stroll as one half of the Aston Martin driving attack?
It's tempting to weave a bit of history into this latest remarkable development in the sense that one of Newey's out-and-out heroes, Colin Chapman, was essentially among the first 'engineer' team principals at Lotus. But even Chapman had Tony Rudd (albeit on the automotive side) and then Peter Warr (on the racing side).
But F1 in the 21st century is a very different deal to Chapman's era, so it will be fascinating to see if it is possible at a high level. Should it be, and should Newey lead a successful project via the new F1 regulations then his legacy as one of F1's greatest ever figures will be embellished to an even greater degree.
