Aston Martin’s 2026 has developed an unpleasant symmetry: the team arrived talking about a new era, and it’s left the opening stretch with the same thing as Cadillac — a blank points column and a car that looks like it’s fighting itself as much as its rivals.
Martin Brundle didn’t bother dressing it up. Speaking on Sky’s F1 Show podcast, he painted Aston’s start as a “nightmare” and went further with a prediction that will land like a cold towel in Silverstone: meaningful progress, he reckons, isn’t coming until 2027.
“It’s a nightmare, whichever way you look at it, they’ve got neither speed nor reliability,” Brundle said. “And in the days of relentless Formula 1 championship calendars and cost caps, it’s going to be very difficult to turn that around in the time, and they’ve got to work out what to do first.
“They’ve got to get the right people in at Honda, get the right direction. It’s not going to improve until 2027. It’s a horror show, and we’re just going to have to observe that pain.”
The sting in Brundle’s assessment isn’t just the lack of points — early-season weirdness can happen — it’s the scale of the deficit he’s talking about. He suggested Aston is sometimes three or four seconds a lap away, which in modern F1 terms isn’t “we’ve missed the set-up window”, it’s “we’re in the wrong postcode”.
This was supposed to be the season where the long build clicked into place. Aston has leaned hard into the idea of becoming a front-running operation: the expensive factory overhaul, the works Honda partnership, and the high-profile arrival of Adrian Newey, arguably the most significant technical signing of the era. The story in the paddock was simple — align the people, align the infrastructure, align the power unit, and the results follow.
Instead, the team has been stuck in a feedback loop of problems that sound fundamentally structural rather than superficial. The most telling detail is the one that doesn’t show up on timing screens: the “uncomfortable vibrations” both Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso have been dealing with, understood to be tied to the relationship between Honda’s engine and Aston’s chassis. When a car is shaking its drivers around before it’s even capable of racing at a competitive pace, development isn’t just about finding downforce; it’s about making the platform usable.
Aston’s best finish so far has been 17th. That isn’t a stat you expect to write about a team that spent the winter being discussed in the same breath as the sport’s heavyweights — and it’s why Brundle’s timeline lands. Under the cost cap and with the calendar grinding on, there’s only so much you can do when the baseline is wrong. Every fix you rush through risks creating another side effect somewhere else.
Even a rare break in the schedule — caused by the cancellation of the Saudi Arabian and Bahrain races — doesn’t automatically translate into salvation. Extra time is only valuable if you know what you’re changing, and Brundle’s point was that Aston still looks like it’s deciding what the first domino should be.
For all the bleakness around the team, Alonso is trying to keep the conversation pointed towards possibility rather than panic. In Japan, he reached for a comparison that will make sense to anyone who watched McLaren’s swing in 2023: awful at the start, threatening near the front by the end.
“We saw the McLaren in 2023,” Alonso said. “They were last in the first couple of races, and they eventually were at the front at the end of the year. Maybe that’s too optimistic. That’s a dream scenario.
“But, in a way, we know that the season is long, and if you understand the problems and you fix them, you have plenty of time to do the second part of the year or the last third of the championship in a much better position. That’s what we are working on now.”
It’s a classic Alonso pivot: acknowledge reality, then insist the job isn’t finished. But there’s also something else going on — the psychology of staying constructive when the car gives you no reason to be. Aston needs its senior driver to keep pulling in the same direction as the engineers, because a season like this can corrode a team from the inside. When the basics aren’t right, every department has a reason to suspect the other department’s work.
Brundle, though, is essentially arguing that 2026 might be about triage more than transformation. That doesn’t necessarily mean Aston won’t improve “to an extent”, as he put it — but the ceiling this year may be limited by choices already baked into the car’s architecture and the integration process with Honda.
That’s the uncomfortable part for a project sold on momentum. If Brundle’s right and the real reset point is 2027, then Aston’s task in 2026 becomes less glamorous: stop the bleeding, stabilise the package, and use every miserable mile to make sure the next car isn’t born with the same flaws.
Because right now, the team isn’t just losing to the front. It’s losing time to itself.
