Aston Martin’s first proper winter as a Honda works partner was always going to come with a few sharp edges. It just didn’t need to end with Lance Stroll effectively packing up after six laps.
The final day of 2026 pre-season testing in Bahrain turned into damage limitation for the Silverstone team and Honda, with a battery problem — followed by a shortage of power unit spare parts — leaving the AMR26 parked up far more than anyone on either side of the garage would’ve budgeted for. Thursday’s issue, which had already cut into Fernando Alonso’s programme, bled straight into Friday and forced a heavily restricted run plan that never really got going.
Alonso at least managed a meaningful chunk of work before the trouble struck. His Thursday finished on 68 laps, respectable on paper, but the ramifications were obvious once Aston Martin rolled into the last day: short stints, no rhythm, and an early end to a test that’s supposed to be about building confidence as much as collecting numbers.
Honda didn’t dress it up afterwards. Shintaro Orihara, the manufacturer’s trackside general manager and chief engineer, admitted the mileage target simply wasn’t met across the second Bahrain test and was blunt about where things stand: not good enough on performance, not good enough on reliability.
“Our main target during this week’s test was to build up mileage on the power unit, check the engine reliability and gather data,” Orihara said. “We collected data successfully; however, we didn’t achieve the accumulated mileage that we were targeting.
“On Thursday, we identified an issue in the power unit, and all of us have been uniting efforts to find a solution during our last day of testing.”
There’s a telling detail in what followed: the “limited run plan” wasn’t just a response to the original fault, but a plan “jointly agreed considering a shortage of parts.” In other words, this wasn’t merely a gremlin that needed chasing; it was a reminder of how exposed a new programme can be when the supply chain behind it hasn’t yet built the depth that established operations take for granted. In an era where the 2026 rules reset has everyone juggling brand-new systems, losing track time is painful — losing it because you can’t afford to break what you’ve got is worse.
Overnight, Honda’s Sakura base, Aston Martin’s UK operations and the Bahrain crew were all pulled into the same problem-solving loop. Orihara namechecked Sakura, Milton Keynes and Silverstone as the hubs working in tandem, the kind of cross-site mobilisation you expect when a works partnership is trying to prove it can move quickly under pressure. It’s also the sort of sentence that reads like reassurance aimed as much inwardly as outwardly: yes, it’s rough, but we’re aligned.
That unity matters, because the stopwatch hasn’t exactly been a comfort blanket either. The AMR26 hasn’t looked like a car hiding a straightforward fix and an instant leap; it’s looked like a package that needs work. Team ambassador Pedro de la Rosa has insisted Aston Martin understands where the car needs improvement, but tests are where those theories are meant to be validated with volume and variation — long runs, repeated set-ups, correlation. With less than 400 laps completed across the six Bahrain days, Aston Martin leaves the desert with fewer answers than it wanted, and less certainty than its rivals will assume.
It’s also awkward timing. The season opener in Australia is just two weeks away, and while nobody wins a championship in March, you can absolutely put yourself on the back foot. The 2026 grid is stepping into a new regulation set, and early races will be shaped by who arrives with a baseline they can trust. Reliability isn’t just about finishing Sundays; it dictates what you can afford to try on Fridays and Saturdays. If you’re nursing components and managing risk, you’re not learning fast enough — and learning speed is the currency of a rules reset.
Honda, for its part, sounded as frustrated as it did determined.
“It has been an enduring week,” Orihara said, “but we extend our thanks to the team for their support trackside and everyone working in Japan and the UK remotely. Overall, we are not happy with our performance and our reliability at the moment. However, we are all looking for solutions together…”
That last line is the key takeaway from a test that otherwise reads like a list of missed opportunities. There’s no finger-pointing, no distancing language, none of the subtle corporate defensiveness you sometimes get when a project stumbles in public. Aston Martin and Honda are treating this like a shared problem — which is exactly what it is.
But the calendar doesn’t care about good intentions. Melbourne will come around quickly, and Aston Martin’s immediate job is simple: turn those “solutions” into laps, and those laps into something resembling confidence. Right now, the partnership’s first impressions have been defined not by promise, but by how often the garage doors stayed shut.
