Aston Martin reshuffle a shock? Mike Krack had dropped a hint...

Big changes are afoot at Aston Martin on the eve of the 2025 F1 season.

Aston Martin announced on Friday a change of team principal as part of a major management reshuffle, with CEO Andy Cowell taking over the position previously held by Mike Krack.

Krack, who had served as team principal since 2022, has effectively been demoted into the new position of chief trackside officer. He will be responsible for performance at each grand prix in 2025.

Incoming former Ferrari chassis head Enrico Cardille will take charge of factory-based development in his role as chief technical officer, where he will oversee the architecture, design and build of new race cars. An official start date for Cardille is yet to be confirmed.

Tom McCullough, who previously held the role of performance director, is set to remain with the group in what Aston Martin describe as being a “leadership position” in which he will “play a critical role in the expansion of the team’s broader range of racing categories”.

Aston Martin’s announcement did not mention legendary designer Adrian Newey, who is joining the Silverstone-based squad with the title of managing technical partner on 2 March following his departure from Red Bull.

The reasons for the changes have been explained by Aston Martin as being “for clarity of leadership” and as part of a “shift to a flatter structure”.

It will mark a first foray into a team principal role for Cowell, who was formerly head of Mercedes’ F1 engine division from 2008-20.

The 55-year-old Briton only joined Aston Martin as group chief executive officer in October last year and has spent the last few months evaluating how to get the best out of the team to meet owner Lawrence Stroll’s lofty ambitions of becoming world championship contenders in the coming years.

"I have spent the last three months understanding and assessing our performance, and I've been incredibly impressed by the dedication, commitment and hard work of this team,” Cowell said.

"With the completion of the AMR Technology Campus and our transition in 2026 to a full works team, we are on a journey to becoming a championship-winning team.

"These organisational changes are a natural evolution of the multi-year plans that we have scheduled to make and I'm incredibly excited about the future."

Did Mike Krack drop reshuffle hint?

While the restructure may seem surprising on the outside, Krack appeared to drop a hint about possible changes during an exclusive interview with Crash.net at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

After making a flying start to 2023 having emerged from the winter as Red Bull’s nearest challengers, with two-time Fernando Alonso claiming six podiums in the first eight races, Aston Martin’s performances have notably regressed.

Aston Martin were out-developed by their rivals in 2023 and that concerning trend continued in 2024, a season in which the team failed to finish on the podium and scored under half of the 280 points they managed the previous year.

While fifth place in the constructors’ championship was held for a second successive year, pointing at stability on paper, in reality, Aston Martin fell further back from F1’s leading teams, rather than closing the gap to the front of the grid.

Krack admitted to Crash.net that Aston Martin needed to be self-critical after failing to meet their targets.

“It is a period that we need to reflect,” Krack said. “It is maybe already for 18 months, because we had similar issues from the middle of [2023]. We cannot brush it off as a one off.

“We have seen now repeatedly in the performance development, we have not been good enough. We have to put this under scrutiny. We do that, we are having a close look because the team has grown quickly.

“You have a historical structure. How are we structured? How we do things? Who talks to who when we do development of performance, and we have to realise that the way we do it is not leading to success. So we have to question that.

"This is what we are doing at the moment and we need to discuss if there are some changes that we have to make, or if we have to adapt some processes.”

The first changes were already made in November when Dan Fallows stepped down from his position as technical director after two years in the role, a move which was driven by Cowell.

Cowell has continued to make his mark at Aston Martin with another significant reorganisation of the team’s management just weeks out from the beginning of the new season.

Time will tell whether it will result in an immediate uplift in Aston Martin’s fortunes in the last year of stable regulations before a new era in 2026 teases to shake up the pecking order.

With Honda coming on board as a new engine partner, a new state-of-the-art wind tunnel in operation, and Newey fully integrated, 2026 is when Aston Martin aim to really threaten F1’s established elite.