‘Quite a scary place to be in’, says Newey as acid test awaits Aston

Aston Martin face an acid test ahead of the 2026 F1 season opening Australian Grand Prix, with their radical Honda powered AMR26 in a precarious position following a disastrous pre-season testing.

The unmitigated disaster saw only 162-laps completed between Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll during testing, with power-unit reliability the key focal point of their troubles.

A shortage of parts as well for Honda, who enter their first season as power-unit supplier to the Silverstone based team, scuppered any opportunity to make progress and learn what the fundamental issues are.

Speculation then was rife that the Lawrence Stroll bankrolled outfit would struggle to even complete a racing lap in Melbourne. Speculation which Aston Martin’s new Team Principal and design genius Adrian Newey didn’t quite quash.  

“Fernando is of the feeling that he can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage to his hands,” said Newey in an open media session ahead of the Australian Grand Prix.  

“Lance is of the opinion that he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”

Confirming the worst essentially and echoed by the drivers in a subsequent media session, with Stroll admitting driving the car is the equivalent of being electrocuted.

“I guess like electrocute yourself in a chair or something like that and it’s not far off. It’s bad for the engine, but also the human inside the car,” said the Canadian.

FP1 yielded only 3 laps for Stroll, with a lap time not even worth deeming competitive. For Alonso though, there was no running in the 60 minute session – with a suspected power-unit problem the cause.

Newey further elaborated in the Team Principal’s press conference following FP1, highlighting the battery of the Honda engine and the lack of spares available at present.

“As I mentioned earlier, we came here with four batteries. We’ve had conditioning problems or communication problems with two of those batteries, which means we’ve, as we sit here today, only got two operational batteries.

“That, given our kind of rate of battery damage, is quite a scary place to be in. Obviously, we’re hopeful that we can get through the weekend and start two cars and so on and so forth, but it’s very difficult to be concrete at the moment about that.”

FP2 proved only slightly more productive, with Alonso hitting the track for the first time but with a best lap still 5-seconds off the ultimate pace.

Adding too that it was only back in November of last year, when the senior leadership team of Aston Martin were made aware of potential shortcomings with their 2026 project.

“We only really became aware of it in November of last year when Lawrence, Andy Cowell and myself went to Tokyo to discuss rumours starting to suggest that their original target power they wouldn’t achieve for race one, and out of that came the fact that many of the original workforce [that worked with him at Red Bull] had not returned when they restarted.”

Given the immense investment from Lawrence Stroll; the mammoth new Silverstone campus and the hiring of high-profile technical staff including Newey, witnessing this low a start to a new regulation cycle from Aston Martin is nothing short of a catastrophe.

Which has the potential to escalate to the McLaren-Honda levels of trepidation a decade ago, ironically with the Japanese manufacturer again at the centre of the issues. And as well with Alonso as one of its drivers in that period.

While Aston Martin deserve praise for fronting up and delivering such brutally raw assessments to the media, the matter won’t unfortunately come to a rest until progress is made.

And for a Newey designed car, with a multiple world-championship winning manufacturer behind it – the expected timeline for that publicly will be very minimal.

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Written by

Jawad Yaqub

An eCommerce Specialist by day and reporting on F1 by night. Jawad is passionate about motorsport, having provided accredited F1 coverage for more than a decade. Live blogging (almost) every grand prix too since 2014, as well as articles on the Supercars Championship. Also keen on sustainability, photography, collecting vinyl, (trying to) expertly barbeque and learning to Dad.

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