Aston Martin lights up 2026: AMR26 fires up as Honda era begins to hum
There’s a new sound in Silverstone — and it’s not a V6 on a dyno. Aston Martin pressed the starter on its 2026 challenger, the AMR26, before the winter shutdown, with Honda engineers on hand as the team’s works power-unit partnership clicks from paperwork to petrol.
The team shared a short clip from inside its factory as the first fire-up ran clean, a familiar ritual of sensor checks, fuel pressure numbers and nervous glances finally giving way to applause. Fire-ups don’t win races, but they’re the line in the sand every programme wants before Christmas: chassis and power unit talking to each other, systems awake, timelines on track.
This one mattered more than most. It’s the first publicly shared fire-up of a 2026 Formula 1 car, a neat marker as the grid barrels toward the biggest tech shake-up in years. Aston Martin’s exclusive deal with Honda begins next season, the Japanese manufacturer returning as a full works supplier with an all-new hybrid unit designed around the incoming regulations. Honda recently teased its own 2026 power unit in a separate post-season video; now we’ve heard the engine and the car sing together for the first time in green.
The AMR26 will break cover on 8 February, with the team weighing up a camouflage or plain testing livery for the opening five-day pre-season run in Barcelona, scheduled to be held behind closed doors from 26 January. That timing’s tight, and it makes this early systems check all the more valuable.
If you’ve followed Aston Martin’s trajectory over the last few seasons, the picture’s clear: significant hiring, new facilities, and now a factory power unit deal designed to lock in performance and control. Fernando Alonso, who has seen a few “next eras” in his time, sounded quietly bullish about the reset that 2026 brings.
“I’m optimistic, because it’s a reset of things. You know, everyone has the chance to do a better job than the others,” Alonso said in Abu Dhabi as the 2025 season wound down. “We start from scratch… We have our new facilities completed now, we have our own wind tunnel. We have Honda as engine supplier – and only for us. Aramco, Adrian Newey… so we have some good things to be optimistic about, but this is a very competitive sport, and everyone is doing a very good job. So we’ll see.”
What his comments get at is the difference between a quick car and a complete project. The campus at Silverstone is online, the wind tunnel is theirs, and Honda’s unit is being developed with Aston Martin’s packaging and aero philosophy in mind from day one. In a rules reset, those margins become multipliers.
And yet, caution is built into the tone coming out of the team. 2026’s slimmer, lighter cars and the revised power unit formula — with more electrical deployment and new energy management demands — mean concepts will diverge early. “A lot of things will happen in the first three or four months of the year,” Alonso added. “When you discover the cars and which direction and philosophy everyone took, you learn a lot in the first two or three races… I think we have the right people and the right facilities and environment to have a good season. So it’s up to us.”
Between now and launch, the job list is the same one every technical group knows by heart: correlation, cooling, wiring looms, weight, aero surfaces, and the hundreds of “small” decisions that decide whether a platform is forgiving or fussy. But getting a new engine architecture to behave inside a fresh chassis on the first press of the starter is an underrated win. It confirms that the architecture — fuel, oil, hydraulics, hybrid systems, electronics — is integrating as designed. It also frees the team to chase performance rather than firefight reliability gremlins when the clock starts ticking in January.
The significance of “first to make noise” shouldn’t be overstated; rivals will be running their own integration tests in quiet workshops up and down Europe. But in a sport that feeds on momentum and message discipline, Aston Martin choosing to show the milestone is a statement of intent. The last time the regulations flipped, one team nailed it and feasted for three seasons. The rest took numbers and went back to work.
This time, Aston Martin wants to be the one setting the pace — and the soundtrack suggests they’re at least in rhythm. The answers arrive soon enough: Barcelona’s hush-hush mileage, a February launch, and then the opening rounds when concepts stop being CAD models and start being lap times. For now, the AMR26 breathes. That’s step one.
- Alex Albuquerque
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