During the tests in Bahrain Alonso and Stroll spent more time in the pits than on the track: the battery doesn’t charge and the car can’t go beyond about ten laps. Is it the Honda engine’s fault?
Training lap, a few passes across the finish line and then retirement. This would be the dramatic scenario that Aston Martin could face on Sunday, when the first GP of the 2026 Formula One season takes place in Australia. A disaster, made evident from the first tests in Bahrain and which sent Fernando Alonso into a rage. But what is happening to the team that last year was a candidate for the role of top team? And why is the relationship between Adrian Newey and the Honda engine engineer already on the rocks?
only 14 laps
—
“We have built a team that will fight for the World Championship.” So five months ago Lawrence Stroll, owner of Aston Martin, celebrated the arrival of the “genius” Adrian Newey in the team, having beaten him to fierce competition from Ferrari and Mercedes. Very high expectations, accompanied by millionaire investments for the construction of a cutting-edge structure in every area. The reality? Quite the opposite. The AMR26, the English designer’s first creation in green, proved to be a disaster in the early season tests, to the point of not being able to complete more than 14 laps without breaking. And now Honda is in the dock. The Japanese manufacturer, after the successful years together with Red Bull, has embraced Stroll’s ambitious project, supplying its engines to the Silverstone team for the first time. But the Japanese Power Unit proved to be anything but up to expectations. In Bahrain, during early season testing, Alonso and Stroll spent more time in the pits than on the track, forced to run at reduced speeds and with large gills on the bonnet to give the engine breathing room. “The engine is not capable of reaching 250kW of electrical power, let alone the 350kW required by the regulation”, Adrian Newey confessed during the F1 Commission according to the BBC. Translated: the battery does not charge and the car cannot close beyond about ten revolutions.
emergency plan
—
But Honda’s reply was not long in coming. “As far as I know, not even he (Newey ed.) has a precise idea of the problems – explained Ikuo Takeshi, head of the F1 project – and in any case nothing like this has ever happened to us at the time of Red Bull”. In short, not the ideal climate a few days before the start of the season. Accusations aside, the emergency plan is already in place: Aston Martin has sent Andy Cowell, former Team Principal of the team but above all Mercedes engine engineer during the winning cycle of the hybrid era, to Japan to try to resolve the reliability issue. And in the meantime, in Sakura, home of the Honda factory, HRC technicians are working to eliminate vibrations which, when driving, would cause the hybrid system battery to break.
disaster announced
—
What is missing, however, is time. With less than a week available, it is likely that the first Grand Prix of the season will be a sort of test for Aston Martin, with the drivers forced to complete a few laps before sadly returning to the pits to avoid a more than probable retirement on the track. Furthermore, the delay in the production of the single-seater has also meant that the spare parts available to the team on the track are in short supply, with the double appointment Australia-China risking proving disastrous even before the start. And, faced with this scenario, the nervousness shown by Alonso in Bahrain is more than understandable: Fernando, who will be forty-five in a few months, knows he doesn’t have too much time to dedicate to the development of this project and Aston Martin risks turning into yet another bad bet for the Spaniard.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
