Adrian Newey Demands Answers After Freak Suspension Failure Overshadows Aston Martin’s Long-Awaited Hungary Upgrade

• Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin suffered a suspected left rear suspension failure in first practice at the Hungarian Grand Prix, spinning him out and triggering a red flag
• Fernando Alonso completed a clean session in the sister car and said the newly upgraded AMR26 felt “more glued to the ground and easier to drive”
• Team boss Adrian Newey called the season so far a “complete nightmare” and said his immediate target is a return to “respectability”

Aston Martin arrived at the Hungaroring with the biggest package of parts they had brought to any race this year, sixteen new pieces fitted to both cars in a single weekend. Within an hour of the first session starting, one of those cars was parked in the garage with a broken suspension and the other was setting the tone for what team boss Adrian Newey called the start of a fight back toward respectability.

Aston Martin had treated Formula 1’s newest set of technical regulations, introduced at the start of this season, as a chance to break into the sport’s established top four teams and challenge for titles. Instead they have endured a difficult campaign, held back by a Honda engine that has badly underperformed and a chassis, designed under Newey’s direction, that has fallen short of what the team expected of it.

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A Chaotic Friday in Budapest

Lance Stroll’s left rear suspension gave way eleven laps into first practice, spinning him at speed on the way out of Turn Two. He kept the car off the barriers, but the red flag that followed cut the session short for everyone else, and Aston Martin could not get the car repaired in time to send Stroll out again in second practice.

Fernando Alonso, running the same specification car, had no such trouble. He completed twenty laps and finished thirteenth on the timesheet, two and a half seconds off Charles Leclerc’s pace-setting lap of 1:19.075, a deficit far smaller than the three to four seconds Aston Martin have regularly conceded in qualifying this year.

Stroll’s spin was not the only mechanical trouble in a chaotic first session. Leclerc, who had been fastest by half a second from Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, saw his own running end seven minutes early when he had to stop at the top of the pit lane after reporting that something had broken on his Ferrari. The team had not confirmed the cause by the end of the day, leaving two of the weekend’s biggest storylines, at the front and toward the back of the field, unresolved heading into second practice.

Newey spoke to reporters between the two Friday sessions, before the extent of Stroll’s problem was known, and did not hide how difficult the year had been for the team he joined from Red Bull in March 2025 as the most decorated car designer in the sport’s history.

“These first races have been a complete nightmare,” Newey said. “Hopefully we can get at least to a point of respectability now. I think that is the immediate goal. Then from there, we can try to keep moving forwards.”

Alonso Feels the Difference

Alonso was the one driver who got to test the new parts through a full run plan, and his verdict after the opening day was encouraging for a team that has spent the season near the back of the field.

“It was much better,” Alonso said. “The car felt more glued to the ground and easier to drive, to an extent, when you are in control of the grip in the corners. A more predictable and easier car, but still a long way to go for us. Obviously, this is only the first step.”

He continued: “It looks better, for sure, and it’s more or less what we expected. This is the most encouraging thing, that what we thought the new package would do the car actually translated into reality on track. That kind of correlation is what we need also for next year’s project, so I think there is a positive atmosphere in the team now.”

Alonso ended second practice nineteenth on the timesheet, sandwiched between the two Cadillacs, but he pointed to a lost lap time from a track limits breach along with traffic and a red flag caused by Franco Colapinto’s Alpine crash as reasons the position did not reflect the car’s true pace.

“I think it was tricky with the red flag and some of the traffic to maximise the lap,” he said. “So, maybe there is a little bit more to come from our side, but maybe it’s the same for everybody, so let’s see tomorrow. We concentrated on testing the new parts and trying to understand the setup direction, which maybe can be very different to what we’ve run at the last few events, so I think there is more potential to unlock hopefully tonight and into tomorrow’s qualy.”

A Freak Failure in an Unchanged Area

Stroll’s spin left Aston Martin scrambling to work out what had gone wrong on a car that had just been rebuilt with new bodywork and aerodynamic parts. Newey addressed the incident before the team had worked out exactly what caused it.

“As you can imagine, everybody is feverishly trying to understand exactly what went wrong and what happened as we speak,” he said at the time. “It’s only once we have an understanding that we can comment on what we do next.”

Once the team had looked closer, Newey revealed the part that failed was not actually part of the new package at all.

“The area involved has actually not been changed,” he said. “We are short on spares, because the cladding and so forth is different. There are some minor changes to that area. In that sense, it’s very unexpected.”

That shortage of spare parts, a direct result of building an almost entirely new car for a single weekend, meant the team could not turn Stroll’s car around in time for second practice, leaving him without any running on the new specification until Saturday.

Engine Upgrade Still to Come

The chassis update arrives a round ahead of Honda’s planned engine upgrade, due at the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort after the summer break. Alonso said the team could not judge the full scale of their recovery until both arrive together.

“We need to find more performance both on the chassis but also on the engine,” he said. “Zandvoort will be a good test for us with the new engine. Step by step, but definitely in the direction.”

For a team that set out this season hoping to challenge at the front under Formula 1’s new regulations, a single point and a tidier weekend would mark a low bar cleared. Newey’s own description of the year as a nightmare leaves little doubt about how far the target has shifted, but Friday in Budapest gave Aston Martin their first evidence in months that the direction, if not yet the execution, is right.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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