Aston Martin finally rolled its 2026 car out at Barcelona and, in a neat piece of symbolism, Lance Stroll was the first to take the AMR26 onto the circuit. In practice, though, it was hardly the sort of debut a driver frames on the wall.
Stroll’s “first laps” in Aston Martin’s Adrian Newey-designed, Honda-powered new machine amounted to a handful: five tours in total, and even that was shaped by a late start and a niggling issue that brought the running to a halt.
This was always going to be a slightly awkward test for whoever went first. Aston Martin didn’t arrive at the Circuit de Catalunya until Wednesday evening, meaning Thursday became less about mileage and more about the unglamorous job of building the car, cycling through systems checks, and making sure the thing was fundamentally healthy before anyone started leaning on it.
Stroll finally got sent out in the last hour for an installation lap. He came straight back in, the team peered over the data and hardware, and then he was released again — only to be told to pull up on circuit. The suggestion in the paddock was an electrical gremlin, with track marshals reportedly noticing something through the car’s LED warning lights and signalling him to stop. Whether it was power unit-related or not, the end result was the same: Stroll’s afternoon was over before it had really started.
Fernando Alonso, by contrast, got something closer to a proper day’s work on Friday. With the AMR26 back on track, Alonso logged 49 laps and ended the day 10th quickest out of the 11 runners. That sort of ranking is essentially trivia at this stage — these are private test days, with programmes pointing in different directions — but the gap in mileage between the two Aston Martin drivers was stark.
Former Aston Martin strategist Bernie Collins, speaking on Sky Sports, put it bluntly: Stroll will feel “a little bit hard done by”.
It’s hard to disagree, even if everyone in the team will insist — with some justification — that the first priority is simply to get the car through its early life without doing anything expensive. Being first in a brand-new car can be a glamorous footnote when the running goes smoothly; when it doesn’t, you’re the one doing the stop-start troubleshooting while your team-mate collects the useful baseline.
Collins’ read was that Stroll looked relaxed rather than rattled, and that’s probably the sensible mindset if you’re in his position. The first day of a new cycle is not about lap time, it’s about correlation and confidence: steering weight, brake feel, power deployment behaviour, the way the rear axle behaves on entry when the tyres are still cold. You can’t tick many of those boxes in five laps — and certainly not if one of those is an installation lap and the rest are interrupted by a shutdown.
The other layer here is simple test arithmetic. Teams try to balance seat time over the winter, but that only works if you have the luxury of uninterrupted running. When there’s a lost day, someone is going to get squeezed. Collins suggested Aston Martin will likely look to “even out those laps in the later tests” if it can, and that Stroll’s immediate objective will be to claw back mileage when the schedule allows.
From Aston Martin’s perspective, the more pressing concern isn’t who got to do what on which day — it’s that the AMR26 arrived late and immediately threw up an issue serious enough to stop the car on track. That doesn’t mean the project is in trouble; first-week problems are common with brand-new machinery, particularly when you’re integrating a fresh Honda package into a car penned under Newey’s direction. But it does underline how little slack there is at this point of the season. Every hour you spend chasing an electrical phantom is an hour you’re not learning how the car behaves, not refining set-up maps, not building the database that will matter when the stopwatch starts to count.
Stroll will almost certainly get more time as the test plan settles down. If Aston Martin can flip the allocation later — giving him the longer day and Alonso the shorter one — that’s the obvious way to smooth out the imbalance. But there’s no getting away from the fact his “honour” of being first into the AMR26 came with a catch: he was the one left holding the short end when the new car bit back.
For now, Aston Martin’s winter story is less about lap times and more about readiness. The AMR26 is on track, it’s running again, and the next priority is to keep it there — long enough that both drivers actually get to understand what Newey and Honda have handed them.
