Aston Martin left Bahrain with 206 laps on the board and, more tellingly, the uneasy feeling that it’s still reading the instruction manual while others are already flicking through the advanced settings.
That mileage was respectable in isolation across three days, but it was the lowest combined total of any team in the test, coming after a Barcelona shakedown that only really got going late. In a winter where 2026’s new rules have forced everyone into unfamiliar routines, Aston Martin simply hasn’t had the same clean runway as its rivals — and the team isn’t trying to dress that up.
Pedro de la Rosa, speaking in Bahrain in his role as Aston Martin ambassador, was candid about where the AMR26 programme sits. The words he kept coming back to were “learning” and “catching up”, and there was none of the usual testing-season theatre about “focus on our own plan” when your plan has already been interrupted.
“We are on this steep learning curve,” De la Rosa said. “We are catching up. We are learning and we are basically in the part of the process where you are starting to learn about your package and about the new rules. Really, that’s where we are.”
If that sounds like an obvious statement in the first proper test of a reset era, the context matters: Aston Martin isn’t talking about optimising yet. It’s not in the satisfying phase where you chase balance, tune ride, play with set-up sensitivity and start to see lap time respond. De la Rosa described a team still prioritising sheer accumulation — aero mapping, understanding deployment and harvesting behaviour, and banking kilometres with the car largely “as it is”.
In other words: the AMR26 hasn’t earned the right to be fiddled with.
The driver comments before and during the test only sharpened that picture. Lance Stroll warned Aston Martin had up to four seconds of performance to find. Fernando Alonso later tried to put that in context, suggesting it may have been more a reflection of the raw gap to the outright fastest testing time than a precise measurement of where the car truly sits.
But De la Rosa didn’t sound like someone eager to litigate the exact number. He sounded like someone who recognises the scale of the job, and the type of job it is.
“Clearly, we’re behind other people,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we are [not] achieving now a more decent amount of laps, kilometres. We’re learning. We’re optimising… but a bit behind our programme.”
When teams are missing big chunks of time in early running, the temptation is to hunt for a smoking gun — a single concept choice that’s wrong, an aero map that doesn’t correlate, a system that’s too conservative. De la Rosa pushed in the opposite direction. His read is that this isn’t a one-corner problem or a set-up shortcut that someone in the garage hasn’t tried yet; it’s spread across the overall package.
“And when you are losing or you’re missing that amount of time, it’s clearly over the overall package. We cannot say it’s this or the other,” he said. “There’s a lot of areas where we have already identified clearly, and we are already working in Silverstone to address them.”
That’s the part Aston Martin will want people to hear: issues have been identified, and work is already underway back at base. De la Rosa also pointed to the team’s current structure and capability, insisting it’s better placed than in previous seasons to respond quickly — a pointed remark given how often Aston Martin has appeared to tread water when early promise didn’t translate into sustained development.
He also referenced the resources now available, and the fact that Adrian Newey took up lead design duties last spring. De la Rosa didn’t lean on Newey as a magic wand — if anything, his tone implied the opposite: that even with a heavyweight technical figure involved, the 2026 reset is still an exercise in methodical problem-solving rather than quick fixes and fairy dust.
“It won’t be an overnight fix,” he said. “It’s not a five-minute job. It’s obviously a lot of work involved, a lot of learning, a lot of optimising, but we have the confidence and we have the team, we have the resources. We have everything in place.”
The key nuance is that Aston Martin doesn’t yet know how high its ceiling is. That’s partly the penalty for reduced mileage: you can identify what’s wrong, but you don’t yet have the clean baseline runs that tell you what “right” looks like — or how far it can be pushed once it’s right.
Pressed on timelines, De la Rosa wouldn’t bite. He did, however, frame “short time” in the way an F1 insider would: measured in races, not days.
“In racing, every race [takes time], but it won’t be an overnight fix,” he said. “Already, we don’t know where our limit is either — because we haven’t entered the optimising phase of development.”
For Aston Martin, the opening phase of 2026 now looks less like the start of a campaign and more like the final stretch of a delayed pre-season. Bahrain gave the team enough running to start drawing circles around the problems, but not enough to turn those circles into straight lines on the stopwatch.
Whether that becomes an early-season stumble or simply an untidy prelude to a more coherent package will depend on how quickly Silverstone’s fixes translate to the track — and on how much lap time is actually sitting behind the areas they’ve “clearly” identified. As De la Rosa put it: “Only time will tell.”
