Fernando Alonso has never been the type to sugar-coat a bad morning in testing, and Aston Martin’s latest in Bahrain didn’t leave much room for spin anyway. An engine-related problem limited him to 28 laps in the opening session of the final pre-season test, the latest interruption in what he freely admitted has been a “difficult start” to the team’s 2026 preparations.
Yet, in that very Alonso way, the Spaniard managed to sound both blunt about the scale of the job and oddly relaxed about the odds of pulling it off. Aston Martin, he insisted, already has “a solution in place” for its early issues — and, crucially, he doesn’t see anything on the AMR26 that’s beyond repair.
That matters because Aston Martin didn’t come into the new rules era pitching itself as a patient work-in-progress. The winter has been framed around big-ticket ambition: Adrian Newey’s arrival, Honda coming on board as engine partner, and a sense that this is the moment the Silverstone operation has been building towards. Instead, the first miles have been messy — performance short, reliability patchy, and the general vibe more “damage limitation” than “statement”.
Lance Stroll was the one who put a brutal number on it last week, saying the team needs to find more than “four seconds” to be properly competitive in 2026. That’s not a throwaway comment you can laugh off as testing hyperbole, particularly not in a season where everyone is learning new cars, new power units, and new operating windows. If one side of your garage is talking in those terms before the first race, you’re already chasing.
Wednesday didn’t help to quieten the noise. Alonso’s curtailed morning meant Aston Martin lost valuable time on top of the already disrupted build-up, while Stroll’s afternoon included the only red flag of the session after a strange spin under braking at Turn 11. He returned later and ended the day on 26 laps, but the bigger point was obvious: the team needed mileage, and it didn’t get enough.
Alonso didn’t pretend otherwise when he faced the media in Bahrain.
“Difficult start, no doubt,” he said. “Lots of things to be fixed in the next two-and-a-half days. But everyone is working at their 100 per cent capacity, at both factories in the UK and Japan as well, to try to make this period of time as short as possible.”
The reference to “both factories” was telling. This isn’t a straightforward case of a team tidying up its own house; Aston Martin is bedding in a new technical structure and a new manufacturer relationship at the same time. And while pre-season testing is always about triage — the essential fixes first, the performance later — there’s a difference between running through a plan and being forced into one.
Pressed on whether the AMR26’s problems are typical early-season growing pains or something more structural, Alonso struck a careful balance: confident enough to keep the alarm bells down, but not so breezy that it sounds like PR.
“I think everything can be fixed, for sure, short and medium term,” he said. “I don’t think there is anything that is impossible to fix, but we need to wait and see.
“We will try to fix everything that we can before Australia and, after that, try to fix us as many things as possible in the first couple of races before it’s too late in the championship. But no, I’m optimistic. I think there is a solution in place.”
That line — “before it’s too late in the championship” — is the bit that should stick. Alonso isn’t talking about a leisurely development arc. He’s talking like someone who’s seen enough seasons to know how quickly a new regulations year can harden into a pecking order, and how hard it becomes to dig out of a hole once rivals stop firefighting and start upgrading.
It also hints at an internal reality: this isn’t just about finding lap time; it’s about not losing the runway you need to understand the car. Every missed stint in testing is one less reference point for correlation, one less chance to map out operating limits, one less piece of clean information for a group already trying to interpret a new package. If the AMR26 is sensitive — and new-era cars often are — then reliability problems don’t simply cost laps, they blur the picture.
Alonso’s optimism, then, reads less like blind faith and more like a driver taking stock of what can still be controlled. The season hasn’t started. There’s still time to make the car usable, get it into a workable window, and arrive in Australia with something coherent enough to race while the heavier lifting continues in the background.
But the clock is loud now. Aston Martin didn’t hire Newey and partner with Honda to spend the opening phase of 2026 chasing basic fixes. Testing is supposed to be where you start asking performance questions; right now, Aston Martin is still trying to get to the point where it can ask them cleanly.
Alonso has seen worse, and he’s certainly driven through worse. The more immediate question is whether Aston Martin can translate that “solution in place” into laps — quickly enough that the first races don’t become an exercise in limiting losses while everyone else races ahead.
