Carlos Sainz doesn’t do doom-laden soundbites. Even when things are clearly messy, he tends to keep it clinical: focus on the next run plan, the next upgrade, the next opportunity. So when he admits a paddock chat with Fernando Alonso drifted into the uncomfortable territory of “not ideal, complicated”, you can hear the edge in it — not panic, exactly, but that particular impatience drivers get when the stopwatch is being dictated by problems they can’t drive around.
The context matters. 2026 has landed with the biggest technical reset the sport’s seen in years: new cars, new engines, new operating windows. And while everyone’s starting again, a couple of teams have essentially decided to start again *twice*.
Aston Martin’s winter has been the more dramatic one on paper. There’s a new team principal in Adrian Newey — a designer stepping into a top leadership role for the first time — and a full works partnership with Honda, back as a power unit manufacturer after its post-2021 exit and a fringe continuation role with Red Bull Powertrains through to the end of 2025. Red Bull heads into this era with its own Red Bull Powertrains-Ford package. Honda, meanwhile, has had the opposite of a clean launch.
In Bahrain, Aston Martin’s final day was effectively written off: a shortage of engine parts, battery issues, and the AMR26 spending too much time stationary. The unit was back on the test bench in Sakura rather than racking up the mileage Alonso badly needed. That wasn’t even the start of it. The team also missed almost three full days because it was late arriving to the Barcelona pre-season test, only rolling out in the final hour of day two. When you’re trying to understand a brand-new car/engine combination, those are not just “lost laps”; that’s lost problem-finding, lost correlation, lost confidence in the sequence of changes you’re making at the circuit.
Williams’ delays have been quieter, but no less awkward. The FW48 programme didn’t make the Barcelona shakedown, and while the team hasn’t gone deep on the reasons, James Vowles conceded he’d have “much prefer[red] to be in Barcelona” than running at Grove — even if Williams filled the gap with what he described as “a week worth of VTT testing”, in what he called the “best I’ve seen us produce here”.
That’s the shared frustration Sainz is talking about: two Spaniards in two different garages, both staring at a 6–8 March season-opener in Melbourne with the same nagging question. Not “are we fast?” — nobody knows that yet — but “are we ready to even start learning at the rate we need?”
Sainz told *Mundo Deportivo* he’d bumped into Alonso in the paddock and the pair spoke for around 20 minutes.
“I ran into Fernando one day in the paddock and we talked for a good 20 minutes, catching up a bit,” he said. “And well, he’s in a situation a bit similar to mine, which is not ideal, complicated.
“But [he’s] also eager to see what his team is capable of bringing and to see his team’s ability to react.
“In the end, we both depend on nothing more and nothing less than seeing how our teams react to the complicated situation we each find ourselves in, but I also wish him all the best and hope that Aston Martin and Honda improve on what they showed in Bahrain.”
It’s a very driver way of framing it: the car is the car, the engine is the engine, the test is the test — and then it’s about response time. Who identifies the root causes quickest, who has the parts pipeline to fix them, and who has the organisational calm to avoid turning a technical issue into a structural crisis.
On raw mileage, the contrast from testing is stark. Williams logged 422 laps and then 368 across the two Bahrain outings, giving Sainz’s side at least a baseline of data and a chance to put some early processes in place. Aston Martin managed 206 and then 128. In modern F1 testing, that’s not merely “a little light”; that’s the difference between arriving in Australia with a short list of knowns, or arriving with a longer list of guesses.
Alonso, at least publicly, is leaning into his usual brand of stubborn optimism. Speaking in Bahrain, he didn’t sugarcoat the start — “difficult… no doubt” — but he stressed that both factories are flat-out trying to compress the recovery.
“Lots of things to be fixed,” Alonso said. “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.”
Pressed on whether Aston Martin is simply dealing with early teething problems or something more fundamental, Alonso’s answer was tellingly broad — and perhaps deliberately so.
“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 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.”
The subtext is obvious. In a year like this, you can’t afford to spend March doing what February was supposed to cover. Not because the title will be decided in the opening flyaways — it rarely is — but because the direction of your season can be. Fall behind on understanding your package now, and you risk chasing set-up mirages while others are already developing with clarity.
Sainz and Alonso aren’t pretending they can influence any of that from the cockpit. But they also know something teams sometimes forget in the churn of a new regulations era: morale is a performance factor, too. A few clean days in Melbourne, a couple of normal Friday programmes, a race weekend without the garage being held hostage by missing parts — that’s how you stop “complicated” becoming contagious.
For two drivers who’ve seen enough winters to know testing lies, this one hasn’t even had the decency to lie convincingly. Now they wait to see which of their teams can turn a bruising start into a functioning baseline — quickly, and without drama.
