Cowell becomes Aston Martin team principal as Krack takes new role in reshuffle

Andy Cowell, the former Mercedes engine chief who joined the team last July, has been named CEO and team principal. Krack will remain with the team in the role of chief trackside officer.

Aston Martin explained the change was done for “clarity of leadership and as part of a shift to a flatter structure.”

Lawrence Stroll purchased the team in 2018 and rebranded it as Aston Martin in 2021. They enjoyed a strong start to the 2023 campaign and scored eight podium finishes that year, all thanks to Fernando Alonso.

However they failed to sustain that performance level. Although they finished fifth in the championship for the second season in a row, their points total fell from 280 to 94 last year.

The team continued to hire significant names from rival operations last season, including Cowell and former Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey, who joins them this year. Now they are restructuring their technical division in order to improve their car development.

Under its new arrangement, Aston Martin has grouped its aerodynamics, engineering and performance divisions separately, each of which will report to Cowell. Krack will head up the trackside aspects of these divisions while Enrico Cardile, hired from Ferrari last year, will serve as chief technical officer at the team’s factory.

Tom McCullough, who was previously the team’s performance director, has moved into a leadership role “where he will play a critical role in the expansion of the team’s broader range of racing categories,” said Aston Martin in a statement.

The shake-up of the technical department follows a three-month review of their performance by Cowell. “I’ve been incredibly impressed by the dedication, commitment and hard work of this team,” he said. “With the completion of the AMR Technology Campus and our transition in 2026 to a full works team, alongside our strategic partners Honda and Aramco, 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.”

Unlike Lawrence though, my Dad was intelligent enough to realise that this wouldn’t turn me into the next Isambard Kingdom Brunel simply because that is what he wanted to happen.

I do find the Lance and Lawrence F1 owner / driver relationship very odd. But I find it stranger questioning what either of them get from it? Are either of them wholly satisfied? Could they ever be? Lance isn’t the worst driver to sit on an F1 grid, but if I genuinely think if I was in Lance’s shoes I’d rather do things myself and perhaps ask for a bit of help along the way, but I wouldn’t want to race in F1 because my dad owns the team.

It can’t be great for anyone at Silverstone. Nobody wants to go to work to make the their boss help their son look good. It’s easy to talk about ‘teamwork’ but that sort of falls flat in this environment.

In his F1 Beyond the Grid podcast appearance, Lawrence Stroll argued that Lance Stroll has won in every series where he had a good car. He’s not (entirely) wrong; Stroll won titles in Italian F4, Toyota Racing Series and the FIA F3 European championship. The first two aren’t that amazing, and the last one needs some context. But, even if you argue that his F3 title was perhaps won under unusual circumstances, he did win. And he won by a lot. So whatever else is true, Lance is in no way bad like some 1980s paydriver, but he’s going to need an absolutely huge car advantage to beat the current top tier drivers.

Indeed. While I understand and share most fans’ antipathy toward Lance (he strikes me as unmotivated and lazy), this whole “AM can’t be good until Lance is gone” and the general portrayal of Lance as if he’s one of the worst drivers ever or something is very tiresome. He’s simply mediocre, not some talentless hack. A driver as bad as many try to portray Lance never scores an F1 pole, multiple podiums, etc. The guy is not lacking sufficient talent, just everything else: hunger, intelligence, work ethic, etc.

He is the most uninspiring, unengaging, dull, dull, dull driver in a long time. I could relate to Sargeant or Latifi more than to this guy.

The hate may be expressed in terms of “worst driver” which you may find unjust, but I am sure the overarching sentiment is simply that he is a waste of space. And a person like that is tiresome.

@Dex The 2025 grid has a lot of rookies, so it’d be a bit unfair to name them. But El Pollo Loco is right to point out motivation and drive. Lance Stroll doesn’t seem to be 100% in it, and in a game like this motivation and dedication are crucial to get that little bit of performance. Let’s not forget the difference between Alonso/Vettel and Stroll is still merely measured in tenths of a second.

@Dex: IMO, he is/was better than Zhou and obviously Logan and recent Checo. The difference is I think the grid is the best it’s ever been, particularly in terms of base level talent. Before the budget cap, F1 always had at least 3-5 utterly hopeless drivers that cost .5-1 second a lap whom you could not call mediocre which IMO means a bit below average. On his good days, Stroll is as fast as average drivers (your KMags, Albons, etc.), but his laziness + lack of ambition too often mean when there’s not a points paying position to fight for, he loses all focus and cuts the profile of a far below avg driver.

Is he moving the team forward in any meaningful way? Is he an added value to F1 in any way?

He is the most uninspiring, unengaging, dull, dull, dull driver in a long time. I could relate to Sargeant or Latifi more than to this guy.

Not sure you understood my post. I clearly stated I share the intense dislike most fans have for Lance. I also agree he is tiresome, dull, uninspiring, etc. which is the reason I literally called him “unmotivated and lazy.” What I find tiresome is not the distaste for Lance since I share it, but these two recurring posts/claims so many make:

A. While Lance is there, the team cannot become a winner, improve or be a serious outfit. Those are sentiments based on emotion and the disgust held for Lance rather than reality or logic.

B. Lance is one of the worst drivers ever or Lance is miles off the pace. No, he’s not. He is simply a driver incapable of wringing extra performance out of the car most of the time (which describes a healthy number of drivers) + much more damning, a driver who is liable to cost two tenths because he’s simply not focused or engaged.

@g-funk Firstly, Aston Martin will want to maximise their situation within any set parameters. That’s part of what being a F1 team is.

Secondly, it’s not clear that Lance is completely set. What if someone else hired him? What if he decided to drop F1 and play tennis, study and/or go into business? If Aston Martin waited for Lance to leave before starting to set themselves up for a world title, it would delay an attempt at it for years (and unless Lance is replaced by a faster driver, there’d be an interlude where the team was quite a bit slower in the interim). Rather, Aston Martin has to be prepared for a future with or without Lance.

Is Lance Stroll a title contender? Likely not (though it is possible, if he gets a car likewise capable of the attempt – stranger things have happened in F1). Does that reduce the point of configuring the technical team in a way that makes sense to Aston Martin? Not at all.

alianora-la-canta I never said they shouldn’t restructure, I said none of it will result in a WCC until they get rid of Lance. They can throw all the money in the world into every other part of their organization, and more power to them if they do. Unfortunately for them, the weakest link on the team is one of the two people behind the wheel who are most directly tied to scoring the points that win you a championship. Lance has been in F1 since 2017. He has had plenty of time to prove himself and what he has proved to be is a driver that can be quick on occasion but overall lacks the consistency, drive, and racing talent to compete with the best of the best for an entire F1 season. So as I previously said, they can restructure as many times as they want and throw as much money as they want into their team but until they get rid of Lance, they won’t win a WCC.