Aston Martin kicks off 2026 with first public fire-up — plus Verstappen’s peer vote win and a pointed Norris verdict
Aston Martin has stolen an early march on the 2026 conversation, becoming the first team to publicly share a fire-up of its next-gen car. Shot inside the Silverstone factory before the winter shutdown and released today, the AMR26’s first heartbeat is more than a social media moment — it’s the first time chassis and power unit come together under F1’s sweeping new rulebook. In a year when the car you design is only half the story and the energy management philosophy is the other half, that first whoomph matters.
No specs. No livery teases. Just the sound of a project clearing a gate that every team must now hustle through. For Aston Martin — with Fernando Alonso anchoring the effort and the team investing heavily across campus — it’s a signal of intent as Formula 1 resets both chassis and power unit regs for 2026.
While 2026 begins to hum, 2025 is still echoing — and so is the fallout from a title fight that twisted deep into the season. Raymond Vermeulen, the long-time manager of Max Verstappen, offered the blunt take you’d expect from someone who’s watched enough championships up close to know when one got away. Max’s year, he said, was “a work of art.” McLaren’s, in his view, was not. With that car, Vermeulen argued, Lando Norris should’ve closed the deal earlier than he did. That’s not a stray jab so much as a commentary on the pressure-cooker decisions that defined the middle third of the season, when strategy calls and execution errors became the difference between breathing space and a knife-edge run-in.
Norris’ breakthrough inevitably dominates the narrative, but Verstappen isn’t walking away empty-handed. In a private vote among their own — 16 of the 20 drivers took part — the grid named Verstappen their Driver of the Year, with Norris second and George Russell third. It’s always a fascinating poll because drivers weigh things we don’t see: race craft in traffic, how cleanly you fight, how you extract pace when the car’s unhappy. Two Williams drivers made that top 10, a nod to the graft going on in Grove, while Lewis Hamilton was notably absent from the list for the first time since the vote has been publicised.
If it feels like the sport has one eye on the rear-view and the other on a tunnel that’s about to bend sharply, that’s because it does. The 2026 regulations are not a trim around the edges; they’re a reset. Chassis philosophy will change, power units will change, and a handful of familiar wrinkles will be ironed out of the rulebook. Expect teams to spend January and February reminding you how different everything is about to be — because it is.
Aston Martin’s early fire-up is the tone-setter. These next few weeks are when factories stitch together architecture, packaging, and software, when dynos and simulators exchange truths, and when pre-season optimism either builds scaffolding or gets knocked down by reality. It’s also when the brave ideas either survive or die. Fire-ups are romance and ritual, yes, but they’re also a pass/fail on thousands of hours of design work: does the concept live in the real world?
The human side isn’t going anywhere. Norris enters the new year with a champion’s target on his back; Verstappen, with something to prove to himself more than anyone else; McLaren and Red Bull, with all the scars and lessons that come from a title fight that went late. Aston Martin, Ferrari, Mercedes — all with reasons to believe they’ve left points on the table in 2025 and reasons to think a regulation reset tilts the table in their direction.
Before we turn the page, a quick lightning round on the year that was:
– Peer recognition can cut against the championship standings. It did this time.
– Williams’ steady climb is starting to show up in places that matter to racers, not just spreadsheets.
– And strategy — still the sport’s most human variable — decided more than one Sunday.
The clock is about to flip, the factories are quiet for a breath, and then it all starts again. If Aston Martin’s echo from Silverstone is anything to go by, 2026 won’t creep into view. It’ll arrive with a thump.
