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Aston Martin cannot blame Honda for all of their issues at the Bahrain tests, as Adrian Newey redesigning their 2026 F1 regulations car put the team several months behind.
The Silverstone squad faced a harsh wake-up call in Sakhir over the past two weeks, as their new AMR26 emerged as potentially the worst package on the 2026 F1 grid. Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso rarely showed any pace, as Aston Martin struggled to complete many laps.
Aston Martin failed to complete a race simulation during the two Bahrain tests, as Stroll and Alonso registered a combined total of 334 laps – the fewest by any team by 252 to Cadillac’s 586. Honda’s battery relentlessly failing in Bahrain also made Aston Martin end testing early.
But while even Newey told Aston Martin’s rivals about Honda’s energy recovery problems in Bahrain, the design guru has to shoulder some of the blame for the four-second-a-lap deficit that Stroll fears his team face to the top cars ahead of the first round of the year in Australia.
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Adrian Newey made Aston Martin redesign their 2026 F1 car as soon as he joined
A report by BBC Sport suggests that Aston Martin’s car for the 2026 F1 regulations is at least ‘several months’ behind their rivals’ cars in terms of development, and that is largely thanks to Newey. But it is impossible to detect all of the AMR26’s flaws until Honda fix their engine.
READ MORE: Everything you need to know about F1’s 2026 engine and aero regulations
Newey believes Aston Martin’s car is “one of the more extreme interpretations” of the 2026 regulations. But the AMR26 that Stroll and Alonso drove across the two tests in Bahrain was slow and unpredictable, in part as Aston Martin’s designers started over after Newey joined.
Lawrence Stroll made Newey a 5% shareholder in the Aston Martin F1 team to ensure that he joined in September 2024 after leaving Red Bull. But Newey only arrived in Silverstone in March 2025, at which point he ‘ordered a redesign’ of the AMR26 to lead with his concepts.
Aston Martin were four months behind their rivals in testing their 2026 car in a wind tunnel
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Newey immediately ordering Aston Martin to redesign their 2026 F1 regulations car to lead with his ideas left the Silverstone crew at a big disadvantage, as their rivals had already been working on their concepts for months despite the rules only being finalised in January 2025.
F1 teams largely knew the changes that were coming under the 2026 regulations well ahead of time as they were involved in working groups with the FIA to refine the rules. Teams were also able to then begin testing their 2026 concepts in their wind tunnels from January 2025.
But Newey only formally started working at Aston Martin in March 2025, and the team were still without a fully-functioning wind tunnel at the time. Newey admits that Aston Martin did not have their 2026 car in their wind tunnel until mid-April 2025, which was a disadvantage.
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