Aston Martin arrived to 2026 testing with the sort of spotlight most teams spend years trying to manufacture: Adrian Newey on the pitwall, a fresh rule set, and a brand-new works relationship with Honda. After Barcelona and the early running in Bahrain, though, the mood around the AMR26 has been far more sober than the marketing suggested.
On the face of it, the feedback has been blunt. Lance Stroll has talked about needing “another four seconds” of performance, while Fernando Alonso has conceded the team is on the back foot. That’s not the kind of language you expect to hear when a programme is supposedly entering its Newey era with a clean-sheet car and factory backing.
And yet, Juan Pablo Montoya is convinced what we’ve seen so far isn’t the real Aston Martin.
Montoya, who worked with Newey during his McLaren stint, has floated the idea that Aston Martin is effectively running a placeholder spec in testing — doing the unglamorous mileage and correlation work now, then turning up in Melbourne with the aero package the team actually intends to race.
“Apart from the Aston, you look at every car, they all look the same,” Montoya said, arguing that either nobody has truly nailed the new regulations yet, or there’s a dose of sandbagging across the grid. His bet is that Newey, in particular, will be in no rush to show his hand in public running. “Knowing Adrian Newey, he is going to wait in Melbourne to run the package,” he insisted. “Adrian is not going to run anything in the test.”
It’s a very Montoya way of framing it — part paddock instinct, part knowing your man. But it also touches on something people often miss about Newey: the mystique isn’t just about clever geometry or a neat interpretation of a regulation line. It’s about process and ruthlessness. Testing, in that mindset, is for learning what you need to learn, not for handing your rivals a clean set of photographs.
Montoya also put his finger on a familiar Newey trait: the refusal to look satisfied, even when the numbers say you should be. “Adrian Newey is a pessimist!” he said. “He will say things are okay, but he’s never happy.” Montoya’s point was simple: trying to read Newey’s body language, or the team’s public posture, is a fool’s game — because discontent is part of the engine room.
That interpretation would make Aston Martin’s early gloom less alarming. But there’s a separate question lurking underneath the aero speculation, and it’s one Aston can’t bluff its way out of: power unit readiness.
Aston Martin and Audi are the two outliers this year, both running exclusive engine programmes — Aston with Honda in a new works partnership, Audi with its own unit on debut. Montoya’s concern isn’t peak power, but the dull, unforgiving basics of reliability and the ability to run the engine as intended.
“I think there’s a bigger question; where Honda is being a single car team in terms of reliability,” he said, noting that limited data can snowball when you’re trying to stabilise a new package. His comparison was pointed: Audi clocked around 600km in three days, while established operations like Mercedes and Ferrari were logging thousands. In his view, Aston’s ceiling is less about what Newey draws and more about whether Honda allows them to use it without having to dial things back.
That’s the uncomfortable reality of the “New era” narrative: the car and the power unit are now inseparable in how quickly a programme can climb. If you’re chasing correlation, bedding in systems and working through inevitable teething issues, there’s only so much headline-grabbing aero you can unleash before the whole weekend becomes an exercise in managing risk.
Honda, by its own admission, is “playing catch-up” with its testing programme after reversing course on leaving F1 and committing to these regulations. That context matters. Even with Newey in the building, you can’t shortcut the grind of marrying a fresh chassis philosophy to a new works engine relationship — especially when both sides are trying to understand the same set of rules at the same time.
There’s also a more practical point: if Aston Martin genuinely is holding a sizeable aero step for Melbourne, it still needs to be validated. A dramatic change in package isn’t a magic wand; it’s a new set of questions. How does it behave across ride heights? Does it open up a tyre window or narrow it? Does it create a balance that only works with one specific set-up direction? Teams don’t just bolt on “the fast parts” anymore — not under a regulation reset where the margins are tight and the floor is often the whole story.
People on the ground in Bahrain have been left with the impression Aston Martin is some way adrift at this stage. That doesn’t mean it’ll stay there. It does, however, underline how big the ask is if the team wants to transform its situation in the space of a few weeks. Even Newey’s best work tends to look inevitable in hindsight; in real time, it usually arrives through iteration, not theatre.
Melbourne will tell us plenty. If Aston turns up with a visibly different AMR26 and immediately looks more like the project we were promised, Montoya’s theory will feel less like romantic paddock myth-making and more like a deliberate strategy. If it doesn’t — if the deficit remains and the weekend becomes about damage limitation — then the more likely story is the simplest one: this is the painful early phase of a new partnership, and it’s going to take longer than the winter hype cycle allowed.
Either way, the one thing that already seems clear is that Aston Martin’s 2026 isn’t going to be defined by a launch-day photo of Newey in green. It’s going to be defined by what actually turns a wheel in anger when the lights go out in Australia.
