EXCLUSIVE: How Newey, Alonso and Aston Martin’s key players are reacting to their pre-season struggles

Aston Martin’s preparations for the 2026 F1 campaign have been far from ideal, with their all-new Adrian Newey-designed, Honda-powered car arriving late at the Barcelona Shakedown, before struggling to log mileage across two weeks of running in Bahrain.

As that bumpy pre-season drew to a close, F1.com caught up with Team Representative Pedro de la Rosa for an honest assessment of where the outfit stand, how Newey, two-time World Champion Fernando Alonso and other senior figures have reacted, and how hard they are all working to turn the situation around…

Pain in Bahrain

“Extremely tough” is the line former F1 driver De la Rosa opens up with in the shade of the Aston Martin hospitality area, while the AMR26 is taken out for some much-needed laps in the desert heat of the Bahrain International Circuit.

A couple of hours later, Fernando Alonso ground to a halt at the exit of Turn 4 during a planned race simulation, ending Aston Martin’s day there and then, and adding to reliability and performance concerns that have grown since the car first hit the track.

The final day of the second test would bring more issues, with Alonso’s team mate, Lance Stroll, restricted to half a dozen untimed laps amid a series of investigations back at Honda’s factory in Sakura, Japan, and due to a shortage of power unit parts.

“There are so many things on the list to be tested that we haven’t had time to – physically no time,” De la Rosa admits, with just 128 laps being clocked across the second three-day Bahrain gathering, before he touches on the size of the challenge facing Aston Martin.

“We have identified clearly what the biggest priorities are, but then you go deeper into these priorities and there’s a long list of other little things. I think it’s a bit of every area; it’s impossible to say it’s just one area – there are a lot of things.

“What makes it more difficult for us is that we need to integrate all these new elements. We have the new regulations, we designed our own gearbox, the rear suspension, we have Honda, and we’re working with Valvoline and Aramco on new lubricants and sustainable fuel.”

De la Rosa points to aggressive energy harvesting under braking – which has emerged as a key battleground of the new-for-2026 regulations – and the knock-on instability Alonso and Stroll have been experiencing behind the wheel, as a standout example.

“You have to understand a lot of things,” he says. “First you have to understand your package, where the car is, where the limits are, and then try to actually develop the package around the regulations. At the moment, we’re in the phase of understanding what we have more than the optimisation part of it.”

Bringing Honda into the fold

It means plenty of head-scratching for both the Aston Martin and Honda workforces as they try to marry the chassis and power unit, and move forward as a synchronised operation.

While Honda recently supplied race-winning power units to Red Bull, the Japanese manufacturer officially pulled out of the sport at the end of 2021, with many of their staff members moving to the new Red Bull Powertrains division and other projects before that decision was reversed.

As for Aston Martin, F1 design legend Adrian Newey only started his overarching technical role last March, with an early 2026 car model not entering their new wind tunnel until the following month – well behind rival teams.

These factors have, unsurprisingly, made the task of hitting the ground running that bit harder.

“It’s very important to have Honda working with us,” De la Rosa continues. “It is fair to say that when they decided not to continue in F1, and then they changed their mind, this increased a bit, or delayed a bit, the process of starting to work on the 2026 regulations. It’s not ideal, but that’s something they’ve already admitted, and we can only look ahead.

“From our side, Adrian started on the 2nd of March, well into the 2025 season, which was not ideal either, but there’s a point in life where you cannot change things. You have to commit at some point, and once you commit you have to get on with it. It’s on both sides that we started a bit late, but we will have a great future together.

“The communication with Honda has been very good so far. We have a lot of Honda engineers here, and we’re living together. We have lunch with them, we have dinner with them, we are in the debriefs with our engineers and their engineers. It’s not that they are sitting in a different garage, in a different hospitality area – we are all together.

“Working only with us at this early part of the year is maybe not the best situation, in the sense that we are the only Honda-powered team, so we are lacking mileage. But it has other big benefits: we have their full focus and we can work very closely with them.”

The Newey effect

Having touched on Newey’s headline-making arrival, De la Rosa expressed full confidence that Aston Martin’s technical chief – and new Team Principal – is the man to bring everything together at the team’s state-of-the-art Silverstone campus and trackside.

“I’m really impressed with Adrian,” he says. “Listening to him, what a clear vision he has of what he wants from the car, and what we need to improve on the car, gives a very good guideline to everyone in the team to work in one direction. We might not be where we want to be, but we know exactly what to do.

“Adrian knows what’s missing, and he gives you a level of confidence that he knows where the lap time is coming from, and that he will get it. It’s difficult to describe. Definitely there’s an aura around him, but it doesn’t come from the fact that he’s won so many championships. It comes because that aura is already set into his body.”

As for the first Aston Martin car Newey has created, De la Rosa adds: “I mean, if you look at it, it’s different. I worked with Adrian at McLaren in 2003, 2004, 2005, and I’m not a technical person, but the moment you look at this car, how the packaging has been developed, how tight everything is, how beautiful it is, you can tell it’s an Adrian Newey car.

“Adrian looks at the car as a whole, and we have great architecture to build on. We have that platform, and now we have to be capable, and we will be, of making it faster – adding aero, adding efficiency, adding [to the] power unit, understanding the regulations, and making sure that we have everything assembled in a better manner.”

To emphasise his point, De la Rosa rolled things back some two decades – sharing a story from the 2005 season-opening Australian Grand Prix weekend that has stuck with him over the years.

“Adrian’s one of those guys, those engineers, that still listens to the driver more than any other,” he says. “All the modern engineers, they listen to the driver and they look in your eyes, but they are also looking at the laptop screen just to check if that understeer you mentioned in Turn 2 correlates with what they are seeing.

“I remember in Australia in 2005, when I was the third driver, Adrian asked me why I couldn’t go any faster in Turn 1, and I explained to him what the car was doing there. He took notes, he left, and then at the next race he came back and said, ‘I went into the wind tunnel, I know exactly what you were talking about, and I’ve made this change to the front wing’.

“In 2005, our rate of development for the first few races was mega, and actually we made the fastest car – I mean, I still have the lap record here [in Bahrain]! It was not the most reliable car, and that’s why we lost to Fernando and Renault… But that’s how Adrian is. I thought, ‘This guy is different’.”

Alonso’s ‘100%’ motivation

Another experienced figure in the Aston Martin camp is, of course, the aforementioned Alonso, who has raced into his 40s in a bid to add to his 32 Grand Prix wins and pair of world titles.

Amid such challenges, and given a previous, troubled partnership with Honda from his second stint at McLaren, questions over the Spaniard’s future and commitment to the Aston Martin project have arisen in the media.

However, from what he saw throughout pre-season testing, De la Rosa argued that – while there are frustrations over the position the team find themselves in – Alonso is pushing as hard as anyone to make the project a success.

“One characteristic of Fernando is that it doesn’t matter at what stage of his life and career he’s in, or what the competitiveness of the team is, that won’t change his level of commitment – it’s always flat, it’s maximum,” he explains. “That’s what makes him outstanding.

“I always say that working with Fernando is fantastic, because you always get 100%. I know people from the outside might think that’s normal in sport, but it’s not normal when you are for many years driving a car that’s not capable of winning races.

“It’s very, very easy to be at your best motivational level, commitment, attitude, when you can see the carrot [on the end of the stick]. When you don’t see that for one decade, but you’re still there pushing every weekend like crazy, every test day, everything, it’s really great to see, great to learn from, and he’s a great inspiration for the team.”

De la Rosa continues: “I feel Fernando is so… I can say happy, to be able to work with Adrian. It’s something he always wanted to do. For one reason or another, their lives have never joined together in motorsport, but now I have the feeling that it’s like, ‘Finally, I can work with him’. They are really proud of being able to at one stage, and before they retire, work together.

“It’s massively positive energy from both of them. Watching them together, you see them sitting there, talking about the car and what’s next, and it’s really inspiring for all of us in the team. No one is happy about where we are, as we are far from where we wanted to be, but we are not worried in that sense.

“The same with Lance, too. I can see how motivated he is to make this project a success, especially with Adrian’s arrival. Lance has been here since the start, helping build the team, and on these challenging days he is stepping up and showing his maturity and leadership.”

Early 2026 expectations

As our conversation draws to a close, there is one more set of questions to put De la Rosa’s way: what’s realistic for Aston Martin over the early races of 2026; how long will it take to get on top of the AMR26; and when can we expect them to be fighting at the front, as they have long promised to do?

“The honest answer is I don’t really know – no one really knows,” he comments. “We are already working closely with Honda in many aspects that we need to improve. It’s not an easy job, and it’s not a five-minute job – there are a lot of areas that we have to improve. First of all, the reliability, because if you don’t get the reliability, you don’t get the answers.

“It will very much depend on ourselves, and what rate of development we can achieve, given the new regulations. Everyone will be developing their cars quickly, but we obviously have to catch up as well, so we’ll see. We’re not setting ourselves targets. We don’t really even know exactly what the difference will be in Australia with the rest [of the field].

“What we know is that it’s not where we wanted to be, but race-by-race we will be improving, improving, improving. We just have to make the long-term as short-term as possible, really. In motorsport, things work like that, but we will definitely get there.”