Aston Martin’s Bahrain test hasn’t offered the sort of glossy first impression you’d expect from a team entering 2026 with Adrian Newey in the building and Honda now supplying works power. On the timing screens the AMR26 has looked anonymous, and in the garage it’s been busier than the lap count suggests — the kind of week where you spend as much time learning as you do lapping.
That context matters when Lance Stroll talks in blunt numbers. After completing just 36 laps on the opening day in Bahrain, he didn’t sugar-coat it: Aston Martin needs “four seconds of performance”. Not four tenths. Four seconds.
Fernando Alonso didn’t exactly disagree, but he did put a more nuanced frame around it — one that says as much about the scale of the 2026 reset as it does about Aston Martin’s early deficit. Asked about Stroll’s remark, Alonso could see why his team-mate had landed there.
“Difficult to know,” Alonso said. “I think Lance said that because in Barcelona, we were four-and-a-half [seconds off], and in the first two days [of Bahrain testing], we were like four-and-a-half or five. So it seemed like a trend in the last three days.”
The sting is obvious: Aston Martin arrived in this pre-season already playing catch-up. The Barcelona running was compromised — 54 laps completed — and Bahrain hasn’t been the clean, methodical mileage-gathering exercise teams crave before a brand-new set of regulations. Even once the times improved, the picture remained muddy. Stroll’s personal best moved from 1:39.883 on day one to 1:38.165 by the end of day three. Alonso’s best was a 1:38.248 on day two. Those numbers tell you something, but not enough.
What Alonso is really arguing is that the stopwatch is currently measuring a moving target. In these cars, on these tyres, with these systems, there’s still an uncomfortable amount of lap-time left on the table simply because drivers and engineers haven’t pinned down what “normal” looks like yet — let alone “optimal”.
He offered a very Alonso example: a lap where a single moment of untidiness effectively made his own data irrelevant.
“I did a lap yesterday that I went off in Turn 4, and then from that point to the finish line I improved eight tenths,” he said. “So it’s just to give you the number of errors that there are in every lap we are doing now.
“There are laps that we are eight tenths up and down by changing one setting. So it’s not that we need to find two tenths. When we optimise, maybe we unlock seconds.”
That’s the key line, and it’s not wishful thinking. It’s also not a guarantee.
In previous years, a driver talking about “unlocking seconds” in week one might sound like classic testing season mythology. In 2026, it lands differently because so much of the car’s behaviour is unfamiliar — and, crucially for Aston Martin, because parts of the mechanical package are genuinely new to them.
Alonso revealed what’s arguably the most underappreciated element of Aston Martin’s winter: this is the first time the team has built its own gearbox. That means also developing its own differential and clutch package — and then learning, in real time, how all of it behaves under braking and downshifts with a car concept that’s changed across the board.
“For us, it’s the very first time we are building the gearbox in the history of the team. The very first time,” Alonso said. “It is a challenge, and we need to get better. We need to have more info. The very first time, as I said, we build the gearbox, we build the differential, the clutch, these kind of thing.
“So when we run there, and maybe some of the downshifts are a little bit harsh or whatever, we come back, we change a couple of settings, we test again. We used to have a Mercedes engine and gearbox with all the settings done, and for us now it’s all new.”
That last sentence is doing a lot of work. Aston Martin has effectively traded a mature, well-understood set of hardware and baseline maps for a clean-sheet programme. Even with top-level personnel and shiny infrastructure, the first season of a new partnership is rarely seamless — and the early hints from Bahrain suggest the AMR26 is still in that “find the edges of the envelope, then decide where the envelope should be” phase.
It also explains why some of the on-track moments have looked edgy. Alonso was asked about a sequence in which he appeared to be locking up repeatedly, including one particularly big stop. He didn’t deny it — but he didn’t frame it as the whole story either.
“Yes and no,” he said. “I think it is one of them, but we cannot forget” the scale of what’s new.
What does that mean for Melbourne? Alonso, at least, isn’t playing the game of talking it up. The message internally sounds like: accept the starting point, don’t pretend it’s better than it is, and use every remaining lap of testing to turn “new” into “known”.
“Let’s hope next week we have a better picture,” he said. “We are realistic. We will not be the fastest in Melbourne. We started on the slow side and on the back foot, but difficult to guess exactly where.”
That’s the reality Aston Martin has to live with for now: a team that looks like it has all the tools for something bigger, but is spending the first days of this new era doing the unglamorous work of making a complicated machine behave. Stroll’s “four seconds” line may be the headline, but Alonso’s point is the more telling one — because until the basics are tamed, nobody at Aston Martin can be sure how much of that deficit is performance, and how much is simply unfinished understanding.
