Fernando Alonso did what Fernando Alonso does best when the spotlight swings toward a problem he can’t fix: he shut the door on it.
Aston Martin’s Friday in Melbourne was supposed to be about learning the AMR26 and putting miles on a “completely new package”. Instead, it became a damage-limitation exercise shaped by Honda hardware headaches — and, more worryingly, by the kind of spares situation that turns a routine practice programme into a tightrope walk.
Alonso managed just 19 laps across the day, with the team’s running repeatedly interrupted by power unit-related issues. The underlying concern in the garage is that the Honda unit has been generating severe vibrations — not only hard enough to damage components but, as described internally, unpleasant enough to leave the drivers physically feeling it.
Then came the detail that really framed the weekend: Aston Martin is down to two Honda batteries. Not two available. Two, full stop — the ones installed in the cars.
Adrian Newey, speaking in Melbourne, didn’t attempt to dress it up. The team arrived already under pressure, and the battery stock has effectively vanished at the worst possible time, with the sport in its first season of the new 2026 technical era and reliability still very much a moving target for everyone.
“We are short on batteries. We’ve only got two batteries left, the two that are in the car,” Newey said. “So we lose one of those, then it’s obviously a big problem. So we’ve got to be very careful on how we use the batteries.”
Could replacements be flown in? “Unfortunately not. There aren’t any.”
That single sentence changes the tone of the whole weekend. When a team is reduced to nursing the very parts it needs to evaluate upgrades, practice stops being practice. Every extra lap becomes a calculation: do you run now and risk killing the last usable component, or do you save it and go into qualifying underprepared?
Aston Martin’s problems started before the weekend had properly begun. The team lost one battery ahead of FP1, which forced Alonso to sit out the opening session entirely. Lance Stroll ventured out for just three laps before his car was parked. FP2 was better, but only in the context of how bad FP1 had been: Alonso completed 18 laps, Stroll 13, and the Canadian still spent significant time in the garage before ending early.
“Not much learning, to be honest,” Alonso admitted. “Unfortunately, the Honda issue in FP1 and some Honda issues as well in FP2, a little bit limited our number of laps today.
“We need to recover a little bit in terms of understanding the car as well and the window of where this car operates. Obviously, we brought a completely new package into this race, and we need to understand where to run that package in terms of setup, and we didn’t manage too many laps today. Hopefully a cleaner FP3 tomorrow.”
That’s the practical pain: you can’t tune a car you can’t run. In a normal Friday, a team might split set-up directions, do a baseline, push into qualifying sims, then get the long-run picture. Aston Martin barely got to the baseline.
And when Alonso was asked about the battery situation — the one Newey had just laid out so starkly — he was having none of it.
“I just drive the car,” he said, before adding that it was “more a question for Honda.”
Told of Newey’s remarks, Alonso repeated the line and sharpened it slightly. “I drive the car. I feel disappointed to don’t have a stock. Only supplying one team. But, yeah, this is the situation, so it’s more a question for them.”
It’s classic Alonso messaging, but there’s something telling in the phrasing. He didn’t deny the seriousness. He didn’t pretend it was normal. He simply refused to carry the story. Drivers do that when they know the next question is a dead end — and when there’s nothing to gain by making the public narrative even darker.
Because from the outside, the situation does look grim. Limited running. Vibration issues severe enough to be described as physically affecting the drivers. And now a spares cupboard so bare that a single failure could derail not just a session, but potentially the rest of the weekend.
Yet Alonso insisted the mood around Aston Martin’s predicament is being amplified in the way F1 always amplifies extremes.
“Obviously, everything will be exaggerated when you do things very well, and when you do things very bad,” he said. “Both ends are normally exaggerated, and we are in that bottom end at the moment.
“But we are making progress. Sometimes it’s visible in lap time, sometimes it’s not, and it’s frustrating, but everyone is working towards the solution.”
That’s the optimistic read: a team wrestling with early-season teething problems in a new regulations cycle, confident it can engineer its way out. The cynical read is that you don’t talk about “only two batteries left” unless you’re already in survival mode.
Saturday now becomes less about chasing lap time and more about simply getting through FP3 without breaking what’s left. Aston Martin needs clean running to understand the car’s set-up window, but it also needs to protect the very parts required to race on Sunday. That’s not a balance any team wants in the opening round — and it’s a particularly awkward one when the whole point of a new era is to learn quickly, take hits, iterate fast.
For Alonso, the playbook is clear: keep it contained, keep the focus on driving, and let the engineers and Honda handle the rest. The trouble is, in modern F1, reliability stories don’t stay contained for long — especially when the numbers are as unforgiving as “two”.
