Aston Martin arrived in 2026 talking about intent and leaving Bahrain looking like a team that’s barely had a chance to breathe, let alone learn. For Adrian Newey, now trying to steer the entire operation rather than simply out-think the grid with a drawing board, it’s been an opening fortnight that has offered a brutally clear reminder: leadership in Formula 1 isn’t just about being right — it’s about keeping the whole place together when nothing works.
The hard numbers alone are sobering. Across the Barcelona shakedown and the two Bahrain tests, Aston Martin logged 400 laps in total: 66 in Spain, 206 in the first Bahrain run, then just 128 in the second. Even by the forgiving standards of a new rules cycle, that’s not “we’ve got work to do”, it’s a straight-up deficit in information — and in 2026, information is oxygen.
Viewed through the power unit lens, it looks worse. Honda’s mileage effectively matches Aston Martin’s, leaving the new partnership with a sliver of the running enjoyed by Mercedes’ customer ecosystem. While rivals banked thousands of laps of aggregated data, Aston Martin and Honda have been stuck in triage, burning precious days fixing what broke rather than exploring what’s possible.
And it wasn’t the kind of low-level nuisance failure that you shrug off as teething problems. Fernando Alonso’s Thursday ended with a nasty-sounding failure that brought out the red flags and, more importantly, appeared to compromise what was believed to be the last usable battery Honda had available. The knock-on was immediate: Lance Stroll managed only six laps on the final day because there simply weren’t the spares to run properly. That’s the sort of detail that should set off alarms inside any organisation — not because it’s embarrassing, but because it hints at a supply chain and component durability curve that’s nowhere near ready for a race run of consecutive weekends.
The car hasn’t helped itself, either. When the AMR26 did run, it didn’t exactly glide through the programme with the calm of a well-understood platform. Stroll’s trip into the gravel at Turn 11 — appearing to be triggered by a gearbox-related moment that unsettled the rear — added to the sense of a package that’s not merely fragile, but also edgy. You can live with “difficult” if it’s fast and you’ve got laps to tame it. Aston Martin has neither luxury right now.
There’s an inevitability to the paddock conversation at moments like this: who’s responsible, and how quickly does it get political? Aston Martin’s switch after 16 years of Mercedes power and gearboxes was always going to be a cultural and technical shock, but the timing has made it feel especially unforgiving. Honda’s return was confirmed in mid-2023; others had either already been building for 2026 or had operations ramping up early. That matters. Not because it guarantees failure, but because it narrows the margin for error — and Bahrain has been one long error bar.
There’s also an uncomfortable familiarity to watching Alonso caught in the middle of another Honda reboot. He’s lived the “we’ll get there” phase before, and the sport hasn’t forgotten the McLaren-Honda years — not the quotes, not the tension, not the way blame ricocheted until both sides came out bruised. Aston Martin will insist this is different, and in some respects it is. But when your test ends because you’ve effectively run out of usable components, history starts whispering whether you invite it or not.
What complicates Aston Martin’s early crisis is that it’s not just a Honda story. This is also the team’s first time designing and manufacturing its own gearbox, another sizeable chunk of 2026 integration that can’t be waved away. A fragile power unit paired with a gearbox programme still finding its feet is exactly how small problems become programme-stoppers. It also means any honest assessment of the chassis is contaminated by uncertainty: is the platform fundamentally off, or simply never getting a fair run because the hardware around it keeps falling over?
Against that backdrop, Newey’s media absence in Bahrain has been noticed. Aston Martin leaned on Mike Krack and Pedro de la Rosa to face the press, effectively asking two senior figures — but not the one with the ultimate authority — to calm the waters. That’s an awkward look for a team that has sold this era as a statement of seriousness. You don’t have to enjoy the spotlight to understand what it’s for: when the project is wobbling, the person in charge has to own the wobble.
De la Rosa, though, offered a telling glimpse of how Aston Martin wants to frame Newey’s influence internally. The message was that the room is more aligned than before, resources pointed in one direction, fewer competing theories, clearer decision-making. That’s the kind of leadership pitch teams make when they’re trying to prevent a bad week becoming a bad season: control the narrative inside the factory, or it will control you.
And this is where the next month matters. Australia and China suddenly feel less like targets and more like rolling test sessions, with Japan — Honda’s home race as the third round — arriving uncomfortably early if reliability remains this brittle. Even if GPS traces from rival teams suggest Aston Martin isn’t glued to the back, the point is almost academic without the laps to validate balance, cooling margins, energy deployment and the thousand other pieces that turn a 2026 concept into a race car.
There is at least a structural lifeline in the regulations. The FIA’s Additional Developments and Upgrade Opportunities mechanism is designed to help struggling manufacturers close up via an ICE Performance Index benchmark. If Honda really has started on the wrong side of the curve, the rules should, in theory, allow it to bring performance and reliability improvements earlier and more often than those already ahead. That doesn’t solve the immediate embarrassment of a truncated test, but it does shape how quickly this can turn from crisis to salvage job.
Still, Newey’s bigger challenge isn’t purely technical. It’s managerial gravity. The organisation has invested heavily, built state-of-the-art facilities, recruited aggressively — and now, right at the moment it wanted a clean break into the new era, it’s watching a brand-new team like Cadillac rack up more running. When that happens, the factory doesn’t just need solutions; it needs belief.
If Aston Martin’s 2026 story becomes a comeback, Bahrain will be remembered as the painful necessary beginning: the moment the project stopped being a brochure and became real. If it doesn’t, this is how the questions start — about the risk appetite, about the timing of the Honda marriage, and about whether a genius who has always thrived with singular technical focus can truly carry the broader burden that comes with being the boss.
