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Aston Martin are arguably the F1 team in the biggest predicament with two of F1’s three winter tests complete. Serious problems have emerged with the AMR26.
The Bahrain test was always likely to be the first real indicator of Aston Martin’s performance. Relative to the rest of the field, they hardly ran in Barcelona after a late arrival.
Fears about Honda’s 2026 power unit have been confirmed in Sakhir, with Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll seemingly restricted to reduced revs. Adrian Newey’s extreme car design has also led to overheating.
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Trackside observers say the car is unbalanced too, as evidenced by a succession of lock-ups. All of this adds up to some worrying lap times, even at this stage of the year; Lance Stroll claims Aston Martin are currently four seconds off the pace.
Lawrence Stroll’s reaction to Aston Martin’s poor testing performance
Aston Martin owner Lawrence Stroll has invested nearly £1bn into making the team a frontrunner. In addition to improving their facilities, he spent a lot of that money on top engineers like Newey, Enrico Cardile and Andy Cowell.
Internally, Aston Martin were playing down expectations for 2026 even before hitting the track. But in Stroll’s mind, even a worst-case scenario surely didn’t look this bad.
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According to Auto Motor und Sport, there is a ‘rumour in the paddock’ that Stroll gave his engineers ‘a real dressing-down’ after seeing their performance in Bahrain.
It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened. It was reported last year that Stroll ‘got pretty loud’ after an upgrade package for the Emilia Romagna GP failed.
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David Croft is confident Newey can turn Aston Martin around ‘once they fix a few bugs’. He has heard that the car is currently overweight, as well as down on power.
Newey has publicly stated that the Silverstone outfit were ‘four months’ late getting their 2026 car in the wind tunnel as they waited for him to complete his post-Red Bull gardening leave.
On that basis, Aston should have one of the highest development rates on the grid, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be competing for major points by the end of the season.
One only needs to look at McLaren-Honda, who made similar promises about wiping out a major deficit but never cracked the top five in the constructors’.
The example of Red Bull in 2014 will offer more comfort to Aston Martin fans. The car barely ran in the Jerez test that year due to overheating and Renault engine malfunctions, but they were still able to compete for podiums at the outset.
Newey connects the two cases, but it’s worth noting that Red Bull had already built a title-winning infrastructure by that point. The past few days have brutally exposed how far Aston Martin have to go.
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