ADRIAN NEWEY DELIVERS INITIAL VERDICT ON HEAVILY REVISED ASTON MARTIN AMR26

Adrian Newey has cast his early verdict on the heavily revised AMR26

Adrian Newey has delivered his initial verdict on the heavily revised Aston Martin AMR26 that debuted in FP1 at the Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix.

All eyes in the paddock centred on Aston Martin on Friday as its revised car made its on-track debut in a bid to transform its underperforming season.

Featuring 16 upgrades that include new rear and front wings, diffuser, and sidepods, Friday’s practice sessions were effectively data-gathering sessions.

A metaphorical spanner in the works came in the form of suspension failure for Lance Stroll in FP1, the team reduced to relying on Fernando Alonso’s data as Stroll did not run in FP2 as a result of the damage.

As much as five seconds adrift of the frontrunners in terms of pace recent races, Alonso ended FP1 just 2.4 seconds away from the leading time, the gap increasing slightly to 2.9 seconds in FP2.

After FP1, Newey gave his initial verdict, calling the results “promising”.

“Very early days in terms of understanding the new package. Provisional results are promising,” he said in the Team Principal’s press conference.

“It’s only part of the package. We will have some more steps in Zandvoort, Monza and Baku, so it is the first part of our planned upgrade. Very short on parts so being careful with it and trying to learn all about it.”

“It’s an evolution in as much as the chassis is the same, the layout’s the same, front suspension’s the same. So, it’s very much an aerodynamic evolution,” Newey added. 

“We were very short on time research time prior to launch of the car back in at Barcelona in February.

“So, it’s really been a matter of taking a step back, trying to understand, and go forward with this package.”

Aston Martin debuted a heavily revised AMR26 on Friday

Package goals for Aston Martin?

Newey has denied that set goals are attached to the heavily revised car, explaining his rationale of patience.

“I’ve never been a fan of setting goals,” he said.

“Much more a fan of working logically through problems, getting everybody working together, getting a culture together, and then at that point, you end up where you end up. 

“What I have found over the years is when you’re not winning, it seems an impossible mountain to climb. When you are winning, sometimes you’re not sure how you got there, because you’re not actually doing anything different, or you don’t feel as if you’re doing anything different.”

Newey confirmed that Aston Martin has yet to determine the cause of Stroll’s suspension failure, though he added vital context about which part failed.

“Everybody is feverishly trying to understand what went wrong and it is only once we have an understanding that we can comment on what we do next. 

“The area involved is not what has been changed, so in that sense it was very unexpected.”

Newey is justifiably keeping his cards close to his chest on upgrades to the AMR26, with the stopwatch in qualifying to provide a definitive answer on their impact.

- James Phillips

WHY ASTON MARTIN'S CAR IS AS BAD AS HONDA'S ENGINE

Honda's engine has been a lightning rod for criticism in a woeful start to its new Formula 1 partnership with Aston Martin.

But Aston Martin's car is at least as bad and while the prospect of short-term progress is at least greater on the chassis side, the team admits it must be "honest" about its part in the terrible deficit the AMR26 has at the start of 2026.

Honda's engine problems are well established, as it is down on power and suffers from poor reliability, but they do not explain everything that has gone wrong so far to leave Aston Martin around 3.5 seconds slower than the fastest pace in qualifying.

As Aston Martin chief trackside officer Mike Krack said in Japan: "We are not great in high-speed corners. We are not on the weight limit."

This is a chronically troubled package that gets to corners slower, goes through them slower, and accelerates off them slower. Minimum speeds being down by as much as 20km/h (12mph) to the fastest cars in qualifying at the last round at Suzuka showed that even when the drivers were approaching corners much slower than rivals, they still had to be conservative.

The downforce just seems to be surprisingly lacking for a car team boss and technical chief Adrian Newey reckoned pre-season was probably already a chassis that could run in the top 10 if engines were not a factor.

"I look at our package and I don't feel as if we've particularly missed anything," he said at the Australian Grand Prix season opener.

"So therefore I believe that the car has huge tremendous development potential in it.

"It will take of course a few races for us to fully realise that potential. We've got quite an aggressive development plan under way.

"It's fair to say that here in Melbourne we are a bit behind the leaders. Probably I would say maybe we're the fifth-best team, so sort of potential Q3 qualifiers, on the chassis side.

"Obviously not where we want to be, but with the potential to be up front at some point in the season."

There is no obvious caveat here that Newey meant 'in time we will be potential Q3 qualifiers with this chassis' once that development plan kicks in. He was talking as though that was the AMR26's immediate place in the pecking order, and it could become a frontrunner in time, but was being dragged down by the engine.

As the season has unfolded, that position has seemed less and less valid.

Aston Martin is 2-2.5s adrift of the lead midfield teams which includes Alpine, using a Mercedes engine. For Newey's claim that Aston Martin's chassis could qualify in the top 10 to be true, Honda's engine would need to be 2.5s a lap worse than the benchmark.

Nobody seems to believe this is the case, even though it is impossible to put an exact figure on what the split in responsibility really is. An equal responsibility for the deficit would put it at around 1.5-1.7s each for car and engine, but some even think the car might be a bigger problem right now.

Newey's position may have shifted since the season started, of course. Certainly there has been no attempt from Krack to side-step Aston Martin's role in the troubles.

He said in Japan: "We have some major steps to take, not small steps that we have now done with reliability." And when he said there is a "big mountain to climb", he did not just mean for Honda. Do not forget that Aston Martin is producing its own in-house gearbox for the first time since 2008, too, and this has been speculated to be overweight as well.

Separating what is car and what is engine has never been harder in F1 given how symbiotic the two parts are in the new energy-limited 2026 formula. The whole purpose of a works partnership is to have everything working together beautifully in tandem. But trying to incorporate each other's desires can also be fraught with peril.

Honda has previously said a desire from Aston Martin to make the overall engine length shorter and more compact, for example, prompted revisions to most of the engine's peripheral equipment and how it is integrated into the car.

Although the design of the engine itself did not have to be changed, these kinds of demands could be part of how Aston Martin is potentially responsible for some mechanical engine weaknesses. Another example is the chassis itself.

When Honda's engine started the year shaking itself to pieces with excessive vibrations, which in turn also caused reasonably significant driver discomfort, the finger was effectively pointed at the engine manufacturer.

As time has passed, though, the possibility of this being at least partly a chassis problem has not been discounted.

That could be the construction of the chassis itself somehow being more prone to transmitting the vibrations or, perhaps more likely, the way the engine has to be integrated with it - especially as the MGU-K and battery are mounted to the chassis.

This could be why Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe said at Suzuka: "In the test on the dyno the vibration is an acceptable level, but once we integrate in the actual chassis, that vibration is getting much more than the test on the dyno.

"So, of course [we] cannot solve the problem [with] only the power unit, so we are really closely together with Aston Martin to solve the problem, not only the power unit but also together with the chassis."

So, while Honda has underdelivered so far, it is obviously fair to conclude that Aston Martin falling so far below its own expectations is not solely the responsibility of its engine partner.

And lead driver Fernando Alonso has dropped several hints that a car overhaul could be required.

Alonso told DAZN Spain that the car is going to stay the same way "for the next 10" races, although it seems unlikely Aston Martin won't have any car upgrades at all. What Alonso probably meant is that nothing meaningful is going to change and it's the final part of 2026, at the earliest, where there could be a big overhaul, as he said Aston Martin will not change too much on this car if it knows "it will change completely in a few months' time".

As Newey claimed the car itself has a strong foundation, it will be interesting to see if Aston Martin's development will be based on that or mean having to go in a different direction. Either way, Alonso's not expecting a drastic change in fortune until after the summer break.

If there is a load of hidden goodness in the AMR26, then more track time and extensive development work could unleash it. It's fair to say this remains F1's most underexploited 2026 package because the car simply hasn't done enough laps to optimise.

And Alonso is still fully on message that there is "very, very huge potential on the car and on the engine as well". He's referenced McLaren going from being at the back at the start of 2023 to scoring podiums that year, then emerging as a race and title-winning force.

And while he admitted that is an optimistic reference for Aston Martin as its circumstances are so different, it is certainly true that a rubbish start to the year doesn't have to mean the whole season's a write-off.

April is also a very useful gap to make some progress. It will allow a load of work already ongoing to hopefully come to fruition, with some weight to be taken off the car by Miami and maybe car upgrades to start addressing the high-speed load and balance problems.

Krack said "you cannot produce miracles" in five weeks, though, so whatever progress can be made is likely to be minor compared to what Aston Martin will hope is possible over the rest of the year.

- SCOTT MITCHELL-MALM

ASTON MARTIN SAYS ITS F1 CAR RISKS GIVING DRIVERS 'NERVE DAMADE'

Aston Martin has predicted it is unlikely to finish Formula 1’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix without its drivers risking suffering permanent nerve damage

Headlines from ABC News LiveCatch up on the developing stories making headlines.
The Associated Press

MELBOURNE, Australia -- Aston Martin has predicted it is unlikely to finish Formula 1's season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Sunday without its drivers risking suffering permanent nerve damage.

Adrian Newey, the F1 car design great who’s heading into his first race as Aston Martin’s team principal, said Thursday the team's Honda power unit causes vibrations which could damage the hands of drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll. Neither will likely be able to tolerate even half of the 58-lap race distance, Newey added.

Aston Martin had a poor preseason, often slower even than new team Cadillac and it logged the fewest laps of all 11 teams.

“That vibration (transmitted from Honda’s power unit) into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems,” said Newey.

“Mirrors falling off the air, tail lights falling off, that sort of thing, which we are having to address. But, the much more significant problem with that is that that vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver’s fingers.

“So Fernando is of the feeling that he can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage into his hands. Lance is of the opinion that he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.

“We are going to have to be very heavily restricted on how many laps we do in the race until we get on top of the source of the vibration — and to improve the vibration at source.”

Despite the long list of issues, Newey says the AMR26 car has tremendous potential as F1 starts a new era of regulations.

He argued the chassis is F1’s fifth-best behind the expected top-teams Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull and that, following an aggressive development program, has the potential to run at the front at some point in 2026.

Alonso, though, is keeping the faith until Friday practice in Melbourne, where he believes fixes on the car might provide a sunnier outlook.

“For us, it’s just vibrating everything,” the two-time F1 champion said.

“But it’s not only for us. The car is struggling a little bit, so that’s why we have some issues, some reliability problems that made our days slightly short

“Since (pre-season testing in) Bahrain, there were a couple of tests done and some of the solutions are implemented on the car now, so (I’m) curious to see what (happens) tomorrow (and) if we can improve.”

Its disappointing performance has been variously attributed to a compressed design time due to late arrival; Honda’s need to rebuild its research and development capabilities after leaving Red Bull, the challenge of producing a new in-house gearbox, and the team running a so-far unproven fuels partner in Aramco.

But it’s the side effects that will likely sideline its cars early in Sunday’s race at Albert Park.

- STEWART BELL, Associated Press

ASTON MARTIN AMR26 ROARS: HONDA'S 2026 POWER PLAY BEGINS

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

KEY ADRIAN NEWEY ADVANTAGE SPOTTED AFTER DOUBLE MCLAREN INSPECTION COMPLETE

Adrian Newey: Aston Martin's ticket to the top?
 

Adrian Newey’s habit of inspecting rival cars on the grid stems from his belief that he can “learn” from his competitors, a former Mercedes mechanic and pit crew member has claimed.

It comes after the Aston Martin man was spotted by PlanetF1.com studying the dominant McLaren MCL39 in Monaco and Britain earlier this season.

Why Adrian Newey has eyed the McLaren MCL39 during the F1 2025 season

Newey stands as the most decorated individual in F1 history with involvement in more than 200 races wins and a combined 26 Drivers’ and Constructors’ title triumphs for the likes of Williams, McLaren and Red Bull.

The 66-year-old joined Aston Martin in the newly created role of managing technical partner in March, as well as becoming a shareholder in the F1 team.

Newey is currently leading the development of Aston Martin’s first car – expected to be named the AMR26 – for the new F1 2026 rules, which will see the sport embrace 50 per cent electrification, fully sustainable fuels and active aerodynamics.

Adrian Newey: Aston Martin’s ticket to the top of F1?

Although Newey’s primary focus is on the 2026 car, the legendary designer has joined his new team trackside at various races during the F1 2025 season, appearing with Aston Martin at the Monaco and British Grands Prix.

On both occasions, PlanetF1.com journalist Thomas Maher spotted Newey taking a close look at the championship-leading McLaren MCL39 driven by Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris (below).

Adrian Newey studies the McLaren MCL39 on the 2025 Monaco Grand Prix grid (Image: Thomas Maher, PlanetF1.com)
 

Adrian Newey checks out the McLaren at Silverstone (Image: Thomas Maher, PlanetF1.com)
 

McLaren has tasted victory at 12 of the 16 races held so far in F1 2025, establishing a 337-point advantage in the Constructors’ standings with eight rounds remaining.

 The Woking-based team can clinch a second successive teams’ title at next weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku.

Ryan McGarva, a former Mercedes mechanic, reckons that Newey’s willingness to analyse what his competitors are doing is a key element behind his success.

He told Champions Speakers in association with PlanetF1.com: “Data is analysed in every area of F1, whether it’s in the pit stops, whether it’s the performance of the car, the reliability of the car.

“I think the first thing that they would do is we analyse ourselves and the things that the team can control.

“They also analyse the competition, so it’s very important to look at the other nine teams on the grid and what they’re doing, and any lessons that can be learned from what your competition are doing.

 “Adrian Newey is one of the best F1 designers that there’s ever been, but at the start of the race you regularly see him on the grid looking at what all the other teams are doing.

"He’s just taking in and realises he can learn from the other nine teams on the grid, so it’s very important to analyse your competitors.

“In the olden days the data was the advantage, so the more data you had the more of an advantage you had.

“But actually now the teams all have a very similar amount of data and they all have the same information available to them.

“So actually the strengths come from your team and how they analyse that data, how they prioritise what they look at, and realising when there’s bad data as well and not reacting to that.

“So I think it’s actually the people as much as the data.”

Speaking at last month’s Dutch Grand Prix, Aston Martin driver and two-time World Champion Fernando Alonso outlined his excitement over working with Newey ahead of the F1 2026 rules reset.

Asked if he is starting to understand how Newey ticks, Alonso told PlanetF1.com and other publications at Zandvoort: “Yes, definitely.

“You spend more time with him and you keep learning things and how he works and how he approach things, challenges, all these normal day-by-day, things in Formula 1.

“But I think he’s still a person that is very special and I think only few people will understand him fully and will be able to know exactly what he’s thinking and what he’s doing."

“So we will need more time. At the moment, we are in a phase of learning from him.

“Every conversation, every idea, everything that he says, we take it very carefully.

“We listen and we try to understand the approach that he’s taking into that comment.

“And thanks to that, I think we are growing as a team, so it has been very special for sure.”

Asked if he gets the impression that Newey understands him too, Alonso replied: “I think so!

“I think all the questions and all the ideas that he raises, he explains why he thinks that it’s going to be a good solution for the team, for the car and for the drivers as well.

“In terms of how to approach the corner entry, maybe next year is very different than this year’s cars.

“Top speed is going to be different next year. Tyres are going to be different next year.

“So he tries to anticipate what the drivers will face in certain moments on the lap, in quali, versus the race and all this kind of thing.

“So he’s very educative.”

 - Oliver Harden