Aston Martin has openly admitted to significant difficulties during Formula 1 pre-season testing in Bahrain, shedding light on the factors currently slowing the development of the new AMR26 driven by Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.
The Silverstone-based team, now operating under the technical direction of Adrian Newey, is enduring a particularly complicated start to the year. After already beginning its programme late in Barcelona, Aston Martin has encountered a series of issues with the AMR26 that have severely limited track time. Last week in Bahrain, Alonso and Stroll completed just 203 laps across three days — the lowest total among the eleven teams on the grid.
Trackside team boss Mike Krack, the former team principal, acknowledged that many of the current setbacks are still linked to the initial delays that disrupted the early phase of testing.
Unfortunately, the first day of the second Bahrain test session proved even more problematic. Fernando Alonso missed most of the morning running due to a power unit-related issue, managing only 28 laps. Lance Stroll completed just 26 laps after what appeared to be a problem with the active aerodynamics system sent him into the gravel at Turn 11.
Addressing the challenges Aston Martin is facing, Krack was candid: “We need reliability. The wheels have to turn. So far, we haven’t managed to make them turn as much as we would have liked. You learn with every lap, and for every lap you don’t do or that you lose, you then have to recover ground, so it hasn’t been a fantastic start. We recognize that we have work to do and we understand that we are not at the level of the others.”
He continued: “But everything is new. The partnership with Honda, and we are building the gearbox and suspension in-house, and it’s a huge project. I hope these are early teething problems, but even if the start is difficult we have to stay focused, analyze the issues and solve them step by step.”
Krack also admitted that the team is currently dealing with numerous small issues rather than one single, clear weakness: “We have new electronics, new partners, a new gearbox, new suspension. It’s difficult to isolate one single area. That would be the easiest thing, because if you have just one element to fix you can concentrate all your efforts there.”
“Probably the delay has put us in a more complicated situation from a reliability point of view. But I’ve said it before: if you don’t accumulate laps — and I think we’ve done three times fewer laps than some of the top competitors — you fall behind. You have to be realistic and then recover. There’s no other way, but the others are not waiting for us, so we really have to do our very best not to lose contact.”
Aston Martin’s struggles in Bahrain underscore the immense challenge of the 2026 regulatory shift, with Mike Krack emphasizing that while the team is currently behind, the only path forward is a step-by-step resolution of their reliability issues to avoid losing touch with the rest of the F1 field.
Leave a Reply