Aston Martin's chances of signing Max Verstappen will be a 'pipe dream' until they have a car good enough for Red Bull's four-time world champion, according to the team's design great Adrian Newey.
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Newey, whose cars have won multiple Formula One championships for three teams, joined Aston from Red Bull in March with speculation Verstappen might eventually link up with him again.
Verstappen has won two of seven races this season and is third overall behind McLaren's Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris while Aston Martin are seventh in the standings and far from the podium places.
Double world champion Fernando Alonso, now 43, has yet to score.
In Monaco to attend a race for the first time since his move, Newey was asked the inevitable questions about Verstappen's future.
"Max is clearly a phenomenal talent, and he's a supreme competitor and part of that means that Max likes to break things down to a simple common equation," he told reporters.
"And that is, in this particular case, choosing the team that he believes will deliver the fastest car. So if we're to ever attract Max, the first thing we have to do is make a fast car.
"It's a pipe dream about anything else from there."
The Briton said it had been easy to settle into his new surroundings and, while focused on next year's car, had spent time assessing how the team worked and the strengths and weaknesses.
He singled out the driver-in-the-loop simulator as requiring a lot of work, while the new wind tunnel was arguably the best in Formula One.
"It (the simulator) is not correlating (to the track) at all at the moment, which is a fundamental research tool and not having that is a limitation," added Newey, who said fixing the simulator would probably take two years.
'DESIGN TRANCE'
Newey said Aston Martin, whose state-of-the-art Silverstone factory is on the old Jordan team site, had good people but needed them to settle down and work better together after a period of expansion.
The designer said the 2026 rule change, the start of a new era for Formula One, offered "a reasonable amount of flexibility" and expected a range of different solutions.
He said he was working at the factory "pretty much full-on".
"My wife, she kind of says I go into a design trance," he explained.
"When I get into this sort of period of intense concentration, I tend to not see left and right, all my processing power is going into the one area which is trying to design a fast racing car."