Aston Martin’s 2026 F1 car is reportedly far from ready for the first round of the upcoming season, despite the fact the grid will be set for the race in Melbourne in just two weeks time. <\/p>\n
\nLawrence Stroll poured money into his F1 squad<\/a> hoping to make them championship challengers in a matter of years, but even with F1 design legend Adrian Newey on board with the project, Aston Martin’s success timeline appears to be lengthening by the day.
<\/p>\n \nNewey was initially brought in as Aston Martin’s managing technical partner but has now also taken on the challenge of balancing the team’s technical demands with the role of team principal<\/a>.
<\/p>\n \nAnd despite the British engineer’s previous work in F1 having yielded 25 championships<\/a>, his first pre-season testing with Aston Martin could not have gone any worse.
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<\/p>\n Aston Martin’s 2026 testing shows Honda must do their homework<\/p>\n \nAfter only getting in two short days of running at last month’s Barcelona shakedown<\/a>, it was crucial for Aston Martin to learn as much as they could about the AMR26 in Bahrain.
<\/p>\n \nThe first week in Sakhir prompted Lance Stroll to claim his team were ‘four seconds’ behind the top teams<\/a>, and the second week saw the Canadian driver bring out a red flag after taking a trip into the gravel thanks to an incident that was said to not be driver related.
<\/p>\n \nOn Thursday, Fernando Alonso then took to the track once again but was forced to pull to the side of the Bahrain International Circuit<\/a> and step out of his new vehicle, with mechanics rushing to remove the car with gloves on after it was deemed to be in an unsafe condition.
<\/p>\n \nBut disaster struck on Friday when Aston Martin’s works partner Honda issued a statement<\/a> that declared they had been forced into only doing limited runs, after Alonso’s incident had proved there was an issue with the battery.
<\/p>\n \nAfter Stroll got back in the car, he only completed six laps across the morning and the evening, with the team wrapping up their testing programme despite there still being two hours and 20 minutes remaining on the clock.
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