Aston Martin’s struggles prove that state-of-the-art facilities alone are not enough to win in Formula 1, according to Flavio Briatore.
On the eve of the F1 2025 season, Aston Martin announced that it would now use its new in-house wind tunnel at the AMR Technology Campus in Silverstone, having already moved into a new state-of-the-art factory in 2023.
Aston Martin warning as ‘best’ fails to deliver
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The team said it was “the latest piece of the puzzle” in its journey toward a planned championship challenge.
Despite the huge financial investment, Aston Martin suffered a torrid start to the F1 2026 campaign, the first year in its alliance with Honda.
The team has scored only one point in 11 Grands Prix, with that solitary point keeping Aston Martin ahead of Cadillac in the fight to avoid the season’s wooden spoon.
But while the revamped Aston Martin AMR26, with its 16 updates, yielded positive results on its debut in Hungary, Aston Martin still fell short of scoring points.
Briatore says it is a cautionary tale for rival F1 teams.
“I don’t see what the other people have,” the Alpine de facto team principal told Darren Cox in The Race Business’s ‘In Conversation With…’ series.
“Sure, maybe somebody has a better facility. But we see as well the example of Aston Martin, with the best facility in the world, and the best engineer in the world.
“It’s not so competitive, you know?
“It’s only a question of the people need to believe it’s possible to win. Put [in] all the effort.”
Alpine, powered by Mercedes this season in a deal brokered by Briatore, sits sixth in the Constructors’ Championship, five points behind Racing Bulls in the battle to finish best of the rest.
The Italian, who won back-to-back titles with the Enstone team in 2005 and 2006, says Alpine is rebuilding after losing key personnel to Cadillac, Aston Martin, and other teams.
“We lost a lot of good people in the factory because at one point, there was not a clear way to go,” he explained.
He later added: “Maybe we have very good engineering here, but it’s still on the bench. I think so.
“Our technical director [David Sanchez] needs to be really, really looking.
“Now, we’ve done the first car all together. Now, all the technical part, we didn’t understand who’s good, who’s bad, who’s doing very good, very bad. But now we have a picture.
“Before, there was no picture, because there were so many changes. Now we have stability.”
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Now, he says, plenty of those who departed are having second thoughts.
“And we have people calling us to join the team, to join helping,” he said. “Before, everybody was taking opportunities, Cadillac, Aston Martin, et cetera, et cetera.
“Now, a lot of people want to come back. For the moment, no. I don’t want anybody, the people left, to say a word. I don’t care.”
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