Failure is not an option for Aston Martin – Cardile

Aston Martin’s new chief technical officer Enrico Cardile says “failure is not an option” and promises the team will get it right in 2026 as it looks to fight for championships.

Cardile joined Aston Martin from Ferrari this year to bolster an already-impressive engineering department, working below team principal and CEO Andy Cowell, and managing technical partner Adrian Newey. After significant investment in personnel and facilities, expectations are high for the start of new regulations – including a new Honda works deal – and Cardile says he only sees next year in a positive light. 

“Excitement,” Cardile says of his thoughts for 2026. “Definitely. Not just for our car. I’m looking forward to seeing the other 10 cars, to see everyone’s performance, to know if we’re in a good position and have to keep pushing to keep the advantage or if we need to keep pushing to catch teams that are quicker than us.

“It will be exciting… but it’s also exciting now. Because we don’t know where we’ll be, nothing we do now can be enough. We can’t be satisfied with good results from a wind tunnel session or a successful weight reduction exercise because we don’t have a reference.

“That’s true at any time, but especially true at the start of a new cycle. For the last few seasons, everyone has been able to see the gaps and know what they need to achieve to put themselves in a better position. For next year, everything is up in the air.

“We’re going to get it right next year. I just don’t know if we’re going to get it right for the first race, the second, the seventh, or whatever. What we have is commitment, focus, and the confidence that it will be right. We have all we need to do a great job. Failure is not an option.”

Having spent his entire Formula 1 career to date at Ferrari prior to agreeing to join Aston Martin a year ago, Cardile says copying other teams is not the blueprint for his new home to follow. Instead, he says, Lawrence Stroll’s team needs to develop its own clear identity.

“I think there is a difference in culture,” he said. “The targets are the same: everyone is focused on winning, but the F1 team at Ferrari has a very long and stable history, with established processes and tools.

“Here, we’re still building up these things. We have the new CoreWeave Wind Tunnel, the new simulator, and we need to work to exploit the potential of these things. We also need to develop the processes within the company for the way we work, building a lean organization that avoids waste.

“It’s one of the first messages I gave to my team when I started: We need to find our identity and use our vision to shape the organization so that it works the way we want it to work. It’s fine to take inspiration from other places, but copying the way it has been done elsewhere is not the thing to do.

“We need to build something that is based on our strengths and allows us to work on our weaknesses. We want to be the reference, not a clone of the existing reference. You can’t simply copy what someone else is doing, however successfully they’re doing it, because that means being a follower, rather than a leader, and that’s not the route to success.

“It’s a work in progress that is moving forward step by step. I have a clear vision and a clear plan, agreed with Andy Cowell, with Adrian Newey, with Lawrence, for what we need to do to improve the organization.”