Despite being arguably the most successful designer in the history of the sport, Adrian Newey admits that he still fears the thought of not getting it right.

"Some of the motivation is that fear of failure," says the Briton in an interview on the Aston Martin Website. "I've tried to learn to use that constructively," he continues, "because it's the difference between too much pressure, or pressure mismanaged, causing mistakes, versus leading to quite a focused and tunnel vision-like state."

As well as championship winning cars for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull, not forgetting the beautiful Leyton House CG901 and the underrated March 881, Newey penned title winning CART cars in 1985 and 1986.

Now, he begins a new chapter in his life, and possibly one of the greatest challenges, as he seeks to take Aston Martin from the midfield to title-winning success.

The Briton admits that his total dedication to the project is having an impact already... but not where one would expect.

"My wife, over the last three, four months, since I've joined the team, complains that I'm in a design trance," he admits, "and I understand what she means, that I don't see left and right, and I'm probably not terribly sociable.

"What limited processing power I have is all concentrated on the task at hand, given these pressing deadlines. But that's not a state to stay in for too long, and that all sounds quite egotistical as well."

Asked about his latest creation, and how competitive it might be, he admits: "The honest answer is, I have absolutely no idea.

"We are in a period of transformation," he continues. "We've, as a team, grown rapidly. It's now in a settling down phase. Having grown hugely in numbers, we now need to settle everybody down, get them working well together.

"I've never been a believer in saying we will now achieve this or now achieve that," he adds. "I think the satisfaction comes from working together to move forwards. If we can achieve that in 2026, that will be the first tick.

"We are a team of around 300 engineers," he says. "Collaboration, of course, is the most important single aspect and in many ways more than individual talents within the organisation. It's how we all work together and make sure that we communicate and we extract the most from each other.

"For me personally, what does that mean? Well, it means I spend probably around 50% of my day at the moment working with the other engineers, either at a one-to-one level, gathered around a CAD station, or in meetings.

"I generally, if I'm honest, prefer the former, because I think one-to-one meetings are quite often where you can do the brainstorming. The big meetings, if you're not careful, become procedural information exchanges without actually coming up with new ideas, which is, of course, the important bit. So we need a mixture.

"We're under intense pressure for deadlines to get the major architectural parts of the car, which is the gearbox, followed by the chassis, the front suspension, the rear suspension, etc, released in time for testing in January," he admits.

"In truth, I'm probably spending a bit more time than I would like, about 50% of my time, at the drawing board or looking at the CFD, the vehicle dynamic programmes, etc, trying to make sure that we're coming up with a concept that we're all happy with.

"I never want it to not be with everybody's involvement and buy-in," he insists.