Adrian Newey doesn’t tend to do excuses. So when he openly admits Aston Martin has been playing catch-up on its first 2026 car, it lands less like spin and more like a reality check — the kind that tells you just how messy the reset has been behind the glossy “new era” branding.
Newey has confirmed the AMR26 programme effectively ran four months behind most of the grid, a deficit rooted in timing, infrastructure and the simple fact that the sport has chosen 2026 to detonate both the chassis and power unit rulebooks at once. The consequences were visible immediately in Barcelona, where Aston Martin arrived late to the first pre-season shakedown and ended up completing only two of its permitted three days.
The numbers weren’t pretty. Aston Martin logged 54 laps across its curtailed running, leaving it bottom of the lap count and roughly 100 laps shy of Cadillac, the next-lowest on mileage. The AMR26 finally appeared on the penultimate afternoon with Lance Stroll driving, before Fernando Alonso took over for the final day — valuable time on track, yes, but not the kind of uninterrupted, methodical programme teams want when they’re trying to validate a brand-new concept.
This is also the first Aston Martin designed under Newey’s watch. He only started work at the team last March, and even by modern F1 standards that’s a late arrival when you’re attempting to define an entire car philosophy for a clean-sheet season. Layer in Aston Martin’s new technical partnership with Honda — arriving as the regulations change — and what looks from the outside like a delayed test suddenly reads as a symptom of something broader: a project trying to synchronise multiple “firsts” all at once.
Newey, speaking via the team’s official channels, leaned into the scale of the challenge rather than dressing it up.
“2026 is probably the first time in the history of F1 that the power unit regulations and chassis regulations have changed at the same time,” he said. “It’s a completely new set of rules, which is a big challenge for all the teams, but perhaps more so for us.”
The detail that really matters, though, wasn’t about Barcelona at all — it was the timeline of Aston Martin’s development tools coming online. Newey pointed out that the AMR Technology Campus is “still evolving”, and that the team’s CoreWeave Wind Tunnel “wasn’t on song until April”. Put bluntly: when rivals were already iterating concepts and building a database as soon as the aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year, Aston Martin was still getting its key hardware to behave like a reliable reference point.
“The reality is that we didn’t get a model of the ’26 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April,” Newey explained, “whereas most, if not all of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended… That put us on the back foot by about four months.”
In a regulation cycle where everyone is learning from scratch, four months isn’t just a few missed upgrades — it’s potentially the difference between understanding where the performance is coming from and chasing false positives deep into the season. Early tunnel correlation work is the boring part of the job that prevents you wasting six months building the wrong car. Fall behind there and you don’t simply “catch up” with a late-night manufacturing push; you risk spending the next phase of development arguing with your own data.
That context also reframes Aston Martin’s late build-up to Barcelona. Newey described an “extremely busy 10 months” and a “very, very compressed research and design cycle”, admitting the car “only came together at the last minute” — hence the scramble to even make the shakedown.
And yes, he still felt the nerves when the AMR26 finally rolled out.
“Whenever a car is about hit the track for the first time, it’s always a nervous moment,” he said. “The team put in a huge amount of work to get the car ready.”
The intriguing part is what comes next. Aston Martin’s message internally and externally is that Barcelona was about systems checks, learning behaviour, and building baseline understanding before the heavier pre-season work in Bahrain. That’s sensible — but it also carries an implicit admission: the team didn’t get the luxury of using the shakedown the way it would’ve wanted. Instead of refining, it was forced into simply arriving.
“There’s more to come – and lots to learn,” Newey added, “but those first couple of days at the track have been important to start building an understanding of how the car behaves and complete those all-important first systems checks before pre-season testing in Bahrain.”
In one sense, this is exactly why Aston Martin chased Newey in the first place: to impose clarity when the regulations turn chaotic. In another, it’s a reminder that even the most decorated designer in the sport can’t magic time back onto the clock — not when facilities are still bedding in and the rule change is as disruptive as 2026.
Aston Martin will tell you the foundations are what matter, not the optics of a late first run. But Formula 1 has never been patient with projects that start “from behind”, and the uncomfortable truth is that the grid won’t wait for Aston Martin’s timeline to line up neatly. Bahrain will offer the first proper indication of whether Barcelona was merely an untidy beginning — or an early warning sign that this new era is already slipping away from them.
