Aston Martin’s winter was supposed to be about turning the page: Adrian Newey’s first clean-sheet car at the team, a works-style Honda power unit partnership, and Fernando Alonso once again positioned as the sharp end of the project rather than the guy asked to drag it there.
Instead, the early story of the AMR26 has been defined by shuttered garage screens and time that simply isn’t being banked.
The team arrived in Bahrain already playing catch-up after a stuttering start to its pre-season programme. It didn’t get through its full allocation at the behind-closed-doors Barcelona shakedown, only sending Lance Stroll out late on the Thursday and then calling him in after five laps. What looked on the surface like a breakdown was understood to be a precautionary stop, with the paddock chatter pointing towards an electrical concern.
An engine change overnight allowed Alonso to take over on the Friday and log an unconfirmed 49 laps, and Aston Martin then managed to add 206 more during the first official running in Bahrain. But even that modest recovery left the team with 260 laps total — the lowest lap count not only among the teams, but across engine manufacturers as well. For a new chassis-new power unit marriage, it’s the sort of statistic that sets off alarm bells because it isn’t just about mileage; it’s about the rhythm of learning you miss when the car’s not moving.
Any hope of using the second Bahrain test block to simply put the hours in took a hit on Wednesday when Alonso’s day unravelled quickly. He completed only 28 laps before returning to the pits, with Aston Martin describing it as a “PU related issue”. It’s an understated phrase that could cover anything from a sensor that’s crying wolf to something far uglier. The reaction in the garage suggested the latter.
Bernie Collins, the former Aston Martin strategist turned Sky F1 analyst, noted a tell that seasoned test-watchers clock instantly: the screens went up. And not for a quick systems check.
Collins reported seeing signs that Honda engineers were using a borescope at the rear of the power unit — essentially sending a camera inside to inspect what can’t be seen from the outside. In testing, that’s not the move you make when you’re chasing a flaky connector.
From Collins’ read, the concern was that something “quite detrimental” may have been found internally, the kind of issue that doesn’t get solved by a reset and a set-up change. The implication was stark: if it is internal, the car could be parked for “quite a while”, and Aston Martin’s running could be curtailed “significantly”.
Alonso, crucially, didn’t return to the track before lunch.
Testing problems aren’t automatically a competitive death sentence — plenty of teams have had messy winters and still found performance once the season begins. But the context matters here. Aston Martin is integrating major change on multiple fronts at the same time, and that’s why lost laps hurt more than they would for a stable package. The AMR26 isn’t just another iteration; it’s the first proper expression of Newey’s influence and, just as importantly, the first time Aston Martin and Honda have to learn each other’s habits under pressure. That learning comes from repetition: installation runs, heat cycles, systems validation, long runs, fault tracing. Every hour the car sits behind screens is an hour the relationship isn’t being stress-tested.
It also forces the team into a defensive testing posture. When you’ve got reliability questions, you stop exploring the edges — you park the big set-up sweeps, you delay the aggressive engine modes, you become conservative with run plans because the priority becomes simply getting to the end of a sequence without adding another variable. In other words, you don’t just lose mileage; you lose the quality of the mileage you would’ve done.
For Alonso, it’s an oddly familiar kind of frustration. He’s never been short of patience in the long view, but he’s also acutely aware that the early weeks of a new regulations cycle are where momentum can be established. A clean test doesn’t guarantee you start the season fast, yet a broken one almost guarantees you start it with questions.
Aston Martin will hope this is still a manageable problem — something containable, something that can be rectified without turning Bahrain into a parts-shipping exercise. But Collins’ read, and the optics of a borescope inspection, hint at a more time-consuming investigation. And with the clock ticking down on pre-season, “we’ll learn it later” becomes an expensive sentence.
If this ends up being nothing more than a scare, Aston Martin will shrug it off as the cost of doing business when you bolt new hardware into a new car. If it’s more, the consequence won’t just be a lower number on the lap counter — it’ll be starting 2026 still trying to understand the basics of its own package while others are already refining theirs.
