Aston Martin was supposed to be starting a glorious new era in 2026, but it heads to the Australian Grand Prix set to battle over last place with upstart newbies Cadillac. It’s a baffling situation for the team, which star driver Fernando Alonso dubbed “the team of the future” two years ago.

The car running the famous tinge of British racing green was among the most eagerly anticipated of the off-season, given the hype and expectation that has led to this point. Billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll has long targeted F1’s 2026 rules change as the moment he turned the team that sports the famous British racing marque into a title chasing juggernaught. He’s thrown money at every level of the team — including a state-of-the-art new factory opposite the Silverstone circuit, a new windtunnel, big-name signings like design legend Adrian Newey and an exclusive engine deal with Honda.

But alarm bells were ringing — and ringing loudly — the moment preseason track action started. The team arrived late to F1’s private ‘Shakedown’ event in Barcelona, before spending the two weeks in Bahrain accumulating low mileage and setting dismally slow times. Stroll spent much of the Bahrain tests angrily stomping up and down the paddock as the extent of the problems with Honda’s engine became apparent. Going into the opening race, lenient analysts had Aston Martin 10th out of 11. ESPN had it 11th, behind Cadillac.

There’s no sugarcoating it. Aston Martin, by its own private admissions is in deep trouble, and there might not be a quick fix, even if F1’s new rules have been written to help manufacturers in trouble catch up down the line. Newey has promised progress will come over the next few months, but a growing feeling in the Formula 1 paddock is the team will be in a hole for a long time.

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How has this happened?

Anyone with a good memory will be having deja vu about the headline item here. Honda has arrived at a new regulation cycle significant steps behind its rival manufacturers, with an underpowered, unreliable and overweight engine. The same happened in 2015 when it paired with McLaren, a situation which barely improved over three miserable, painful seasons. Ironically, as looks set to be the case this year, star driver Alonso was one of the two drivers who had to bear the brunt of those problems.

This time around problems were numerous. Honda’s engine was heavy from the beginning, and Aston Martin has struggled integrating it into Newey’s chassis. Assessing its true performance levels has been complicated by this and other issues — some Spanish media reports suggested it vibrated so much during Bahrain testing that the car could not run anywhere close to full power, even though full power seems to be significantly down on the likes of Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull. Japanese reports, meanwhile, said vibrations from the car are causing issues with the engine.

Worst of all, the engine did not appear to be reliable, and that’s where the fact it’s not being run at full beans is even more concerning — the upper limits of an engine’s performance capacity is often where the bigger reliability issues lie.

The fact this has happened to Honda again is baffling. Some have pointed to the decision the Japanese manufacturer made at the end of 2021 to quit the sport, which saw it put a freeze on anything beyond the existing engine which helped Red Bull and Max Verstappen win titles at the start of this decade. The company made a U-turn on that decision in early 2023, thanks largely to the incoming set of regulations for 2026 which they played a part in formulating. Some have argued the 18 months or so Honda had committed to an F1 exit are the reason for the current situation, as its engine programme was effectively frozen internally at that point.

The obvious counter argument comes in from Honda’s former partner, Red Bull, who have built their own engine from scratch — starting in late 2022 after a proposed partnership with Porsche fell apart in the closing stages — and appear to be coming into the new season in a competitive position few expected them to be in this early. New manufacturer Audi has also entered the new season in decent shape with the first ever F1 engine the company has built. The excuse that Honda is behind because it missed out on development time deliberating on its future beyond 2026 is. Former team boss Andy Cowell, shuffled back to a Honda-facing role after Newey’s arrival, has spent much of the winter at the company’s Sakura facility and it is clear there’s a great deal of cage-rattling going on from Lawrence Stroll already.

It was telling that on the final day of testing, it was Honda who put out a press release saying the team’s running would be limited — usually that kind of press release would come from Aston Martin.

Alonso has bad memories of Honda after a disastrous partnership with McLaren. GettyImagesIs everything on Honda?

While Honda are a clearly the largest part of the issue, blame cannot be laid solely at its doorstep. The problems the team is facing have laid bare some deeper issues which could have been predicted by anyone who has been paying attention to Stroll’s big-money dream team of talent and resources. One of these was the idea that bringing Newey in was going to be a magic bullet in terms of performance.

The design of his first Aston Martin F1 car turned heads in Barcelona, although it is difficult to separate actual technical fact from the aura the Englishman carries with him as the sport’s most successful F1 designer. One notable viral video in the hours after Aston Martin’s car first emerged from the garage at Barcelona likened it to the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel in its unprecedented beauty, thanks to a slightly different take on the assembly of the rear suspension compared to its rivals. Such comparisons seem to have been incredibly premature, with the car seemingly also behind schedule due to the late arrival of Newey, who only started in April last year after a period of gardening leave which followed his Red Bull exit.

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Newey’s signing was seen by most as the key missing piece of the puzzle. Finally, it seemed, Newey, who has built winners wherever he has worked, could design a car for Alonso, who he had never crossed paths with before. A tantalising combination, no doubt. But Newey’s signing did something else.

Each time Stroll has made a new big-money engineering signing, its had the remarkable effect of undermining the last one. Stroll signed ex-McLaren CEO Martin Whitmarsh to a significant leadership position in 2021, but the arrival of former Mercedes engine guru Andy Cowell marked the end of Whitmarsh’s stint with the team. Former Red Bull technical whizz Dan Fallows was another big name signing, but Newey’s arrival undercut him in a major way. Cowell’s position was also significantly undermined by Newey’s signing and ESPN understands Cowell is set to leave the team for good later this year.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The chopping and changing of names in key leadership positions represents major overhauls at every level — ESPN understands Aston Martin onboarded 250 new hires in 2025 alone, and the team has grown from around 400 in its days as Force India to somewhere north of 1100 in its current form. That rapid growth might have been easier to manage if there had been stability and clarity at the top, but Stroll’s impatient, trigger-happy approach to hiring has led to a vacuum of leadership at the top of the company. That’s never a good thing for any company. In a time of crisis like the one Aston Martin is currently facing, it becomes even more damaging.

Newey’s role as a leader might also be under question as well. You only have to watch one interview with him to see his skills are not in the charisma field. While the role of the F1 team boss has changed in recent years, encompassing people from an engineering background, like McLaren’s Andrea Stella or Red Bull’s Laurent Mekies, you still need a strong character at the top to act as a mouthpiece. Newey’s former Red Bull boss Christian Horner was a great example of this — in times good or bad, he would front up to the media when he ran that team.

By contrast, over the two weeks in Bahrain, Newey refused to speak to the media, while Stroll also barely speaks publicly. The uninspiring Mike Krack — another man undermined by the arrival of other talent who shuffled him out of the former role of team boss — and team representative and former race driver Pedro de la Rosa were left to face the media and explain the team’s problems. Rudderless teams with unclear lines of leadership are often exposed in moments like this and the fact Newey and Stroll both declined to take accountability spoke volumes about what the internals of the team must look like.

Two-time world champion Fernando Alonso on track during testing, in what was a disappointing week for Aston Martin. Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty ImagesWhat happens to Alonso now?

The elephant in the room is what happens to one of Stroll’s original big-money signings, Alonso, who will be 45 later this year. Stroll’s son Lance appears to have a contract to drive the car for as long as he wants to, but the future of Alonso, whose deal is up at the end of this season, was always going to be a major talking point and one closely linked to how the car performed this year. Alonso has not won a title since 2006 or a race since 2013 and he returned to F1 in 2021 with the memorable tagline ‘El Plan’ — his chase of that elusive third world championship. It didn’t work with Alpine, but he was lured o Aston Martin, lured by Stroll’s ambitious vision to completely rewrite the competitive order under this set of rules.

After all the hype and the waiting, Alonso looks set for another bitterly miserable year. He’s widely regarded to be the most complete talent of the modern era but also looks set to also be remembered as one of the most unfulfilled talents the sport has ever seen. The fact that’s the case when he has two world titles to his name should highlight just how good most in F1 think he is. Alonso infamously embarrassed Honda about its “GP2 engine” at its home race in Japan during the dark days at McLaren and its almost impossible to imagine he will be any nicer about things this time around.

One saving grace for Alonso in terms of staying in Formula 1 might be that the line of people wanting to talk to Stroll about a race seat must have diminished significantly over the past few weeks. Even if Aston Martin had arrived in this new era of F1 just slightly off the pace but with a strong foundation and a clear path for progress, they would have been a tantalising prospect for any driver looking for somewhere to move after this season.

Reports last year in Italy said Charles Leclerc had talked to Aston Martin as a potential jump-off point should Ferrari falter coming into this regulation cycle. It’s hard to see that option looking appealing anymore. Joining Aston Martin now would be like getting a lifeboat to the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. You can also assume Stroll’s long-standing and well-known ambition to sign Verstappen from Red Bull is dead in the water now. Verstappen already seems to dislike the new rules and it’s hard to imagine the Dutchman being convinced to drive both a car he doesn’t enjoy and one that is seconds off the pace.

Whether Alonso even wants to stay beyond 2026 remains to be seen, and his mood will become clearer over the opening weeks of the season. Usually, that would be a key concern for everyone at Aston Martin. But the scale of the issues is so deep that even how Alonso feels seems will likely be an afterthought as the team heads to the Australian Grand Prix.