Why Aston Martin have hope for the future despite their early 2026 pre-season struggles

“The bottom line is we are slow. We are not where we want to be.”

That was Aston Martin Team Representative Pedro de la Rosa’s brutal assessment of where the British squad stand a few weeks out from the opening Australian Grand Prix on March 6-8.

There is no doubt that Aston Martin had hoped to be in a far better spot than they are right now, having turned up late to the Barcelona Shakedown and following the first three days of pre-season testing in Bahrain last week.

When speaking to the media during the first test in Bahrain, Lance Stroll cut a despondent figure admitting the team need to work on “engine, balance, grip” and that they look like they are “four seconds off the top teams”.

When his double World Champion team mate Fernando Alonso got behind the wheel, he concurred there was work to do. “We need more performance,” he said.

“Missing [most of] Barcelona was not ideal, this is the very first test for us, so we’re still going step-by-step into the car. We are a little bit on the back foot, we have to admit that, but hopefully there is time to improve.”

So, what’s going wrong? How can a team that has spent hundreds of millions of pounds on a state-of-the-art factory, a state-of-the-art wind tunnel, a works power unit for the first time in their history with Honda, a double World Champion in Alonso – who is considered one of the best in F1 – as well as one of the greatest design minds the sport has ever seen in Adrian Newey be struggling so much?

Well, it’s one thing to have all of those individual advantages – and quite another to bring it all together in harmony.

The wind tunnel was only in a position to take a 2026 model in April last year, around four months after all the other teams will have had their own model in their respective tunnels. That’s quite a chunk of lost time – both in terms of actual runs and thinking time to analyse the data – and thus Newey, who only started last March, has had to compress the programme into just 10 months.

In trying to push development as hard as he could within that 10-month window, it meant the team only arrived in Barcelona on the penultimate day, with Stroll getting a few laps before Alonso took over the following day. They were then already significantly behind all of their rivals in terms of total mileage heading to Bahrain.

Aston Martin are also doing several things for the first time, including making their own gearbox and suspension (they used to take those parts from Mercedes as was permitted under the regulations). Those individual projects required completely new workstreams and are huge tasks in their own right.

They are also welcoming Honda back to the sport, after the Japanese manufacturer left in 2021 – but still had people working on the existing engine with Red Bull – before deciding in 2023 to come back with Aston Martin for 2026.

While Honda have proved they can win World Championships through their partnership with Red Bull, they are playing catch up having diverted resources to other parts of the business while many of their staff either went to Red Bull or into other Honda divisions. Creating a new PU from scratch is not the work of a moment, as Honda learned when they initially came back with McLaren in 2015, but they have proved they can fight back.

Given their lack of running in Barcelona, running across three days in Bahrain was understandably a little bumpy for Aston Martin as they really started to get to grips with their new machine, which has turned heads with some very interesting design features penciled by Newey. But they still did get 206 laps on the board, which is around 3.5 race distances, so that is progress and they have something to work with heading into this week’s final three-day test.

Aston Martin know they are up against it – but they also know they have the resources in place to, first, catch up and then get to where they want to. The team see this as a 10-year project to fighting for wins and titles – and they are around halfway through.

The focus is on giving Newey, who was roaming around the garage with his clipboard throughout the test, time to let his designs breathe and evolve and help the technical team work to a level that can aggressively develop a car – and get the most out of it – consistently through a season, something they have yet to show they can do.

Newey has shown he has what it takes to deliver on Aston Martin owner Lawrence Stroll’s lofty ambitions – he’s won championships with Williams, McLaren and Red Bull over the course of three decades so why would anyone doubt he can do the same with Aston Martin?

That’s why the team remains positive that, while it might be a tough start to the year with the team in the midfield rather than up front, they will find a way to charge forward. Newey has already said the car that caused such a stir in Barcelona will look very different to the one that breaks cover in the first race in Melbourne, Australia – so that’s further proof of their rapid development.

When I asked Alonso if he believes the team can catch up quickly after a slow start, he replied: “On the chassis there is no doubt, we have the best with us. After 30 plus years of Adrian Newey dominating the sport, I think no one will doubt that we will find a way to have the best car eventually.

On the power unit, we need to wait and see when we unlock all the performance, where we are and what is missing, and then work hard.”

His team mate Stroll added: “We are where we are. Do we want to fight for race wins? Yes. Are we fighting for race wins today? It doesn’t look like it. Does that mean we can’t fight for race wins in the future? No, I believe we can. I don’t have a crystal ball. I didn’t have a crystal ball before the season started. We are where we are here today.

“It doesn’t look like it’s amazing. Can that change in the next few weeks? Can it get a lot better? For sure. Will it 100% get way better? I don’t know. I don’t have the answers to those questions. All I can say is we are pushing as hard as we can.

“We are focused on bringing performance to the car, to the engine every single second of every single day. Time will tell how competitive we look at the first race and throughout the whole season.”

While Aston Martin know they have a steep mountain to climb, there remains plenty of hope inside the team that they have everything they need to succeed and they just need time to get everything work in unison. How much time, though, is anyone’s guess.