Aston Martin’s first proper test of its new Honda era was always going to be judged on mileage as much as lap time. In Bahrain, it’s the mileage that’s taken the hit.
A battery-related problem that first interrupted Fernando Alonso’s running on Thursday has carried into the final day of pre-season testing, leaving Aston Martin to shift into damage-limitation mode with the AMR26. The team has been forced into a heavily managed Friday plan: short stints, long pauses, and a lot of staring at screens while Honda works through the issue from both trackside and back at Sakura.
Pedro de la Rosa, now an Aston Martin ambassador and one of the voices often used to communicate the team’s public-facing temperature, didn’t sugar-coat it. The running plan for the closing session is “compromised”, dictated not only by the battery setback but also by a shortage of spare power unit parts.
“Yesterday, we had some battery related issues on Fernando’s car,” de la Rosa explained in a team video update. “Since then, a lot of simulations are being carried out… in our test bench in Sakura. And due to this, and the fact that we have a shortage of parts, this means that our next few runs will be compromised.”
That compromise is practical rather than philosophical. Aston Martin isn’t talking about chasing a headline lap in the heat of the afternoon anyway; it’s talking about survival laps, information-gathering, and giving engineers time to digest what little the car can do before it’s sent to Australia. De la Rosa outlined a stop-start rhythm: “less laps” and “very short stints”, with roughly an hour between runs to interrogate the data and decide what’s safe — and useful — to try next.
The starkest illustration of how constricted the day has become was the Friday morning: Lance Stroll managed just two laps. In any other winter, that would set off proper alarm bells. In 2026, with an all-new regulations package and the inevitable early-life gremlins that come with it, teams can at least rationalise the chaos — but it still hurts. Every lap not completed now is a lap you can’t get back when the freight is already being packed.
This is the awkward reality of a new partnership: the learning curve isn’t only about performance, it’s about process. How quickly a team and manufacturer can identify a problem, decide whether it’s track-fixable, and avoid burning through limited hardware is part of the competitive picture. Aston Martin and Honda are finding that out in public.
Honda, for its part, has already pointed to work being carried out at Sakura, which suggests the fault-finding has moved beyond a simple trackside swap-and-go. De la Rosa’s mention of a parts shortage adds another layer: even if you know what you want to change, you still need the pieces to do it — and testing is the one time of year you can’t afford to be stuck waiting.
Still, Aston Martin is trying to frame the day as bruising rather than broken. De la Rosa insisted the team has amassed enough information to be constructive, even if the headline number on the timing screens and the lap counter won’t look pretty.
“Despite the lack of running and mileage, definitely, we are not where we wanted to be,” he admitted. “But we have managed to gather a lot of data, and this will give us the opportunity to have the next few days to look into the data and come up with solutions.
“We know which areas we really need to focus on and improve on the car, which is very positive.”
That’s the key line. In a season where everyone is still interpreting what the new rules want from car behaviour — and where correlation is going to make fools of more than one confident-looking winter programme — clarity is valuable currency. The team believes it can already see where the AMR26 needs work, even if the test hasn’t allowed it to complete the kind of long runs and development sweeps that turn suspicion into certainty.
De la Rosa also leaned into the obvious context: 2026 is hard, for everyone. “The new set of regulations are very challenging, but they’re also fascinating,” he said. “So it was never going to be easy. We knew that.”
Aston Martin is banking on infrastructure and manpower to do the heavy lifting now. De la Rosa referenced both the Silverstone campus and Honda’s Sakura base “working flat out”, and there’s an implied message in that: this isn’t a small team hoping for a quick fix, it’s a big operation expecting to outwork the problem before the lights go out in Melbourne.
There’s also the psychological aspect that matters at this time of year. Testing is where you want your new relationship to feel seamless — engineers finishing each other’s sentences, mechanics rehearsing their choreography, drivers building confidence in what’s underneath them. A battery issue and a lack of spare parts is about as clumsy an icebreaker as you can get. But it’s also the sort of early adversity that can either fracture a project or harden it, depending on how quickly the response becomes routine rather than reactive.
Aston Martin has “a few days before Australia”, as de la Rosa put it. In 2026, that can be an eternity if the solution is straightforward — or nothing like enough time if it isn’t. For now, the team’s Bahrain story isn’t about what the AMR26 can do when it’s unleashed; it’s about how efficiently Aston Martin and Honda can stop it being leashed in the first place.
“We are not where we wanted to be,” de la Rosa concluded. “But that doesn’t mean that we won’t get our mission completed.”
