Aston Martin delay AMR26 shakedown to final days in Barcelona

Written by Kavi Khandelwal

The Aston Martin F1 Team has officially confirmed a significant delay to its 2026 pre-season program, announcing that the new AMR26 will not hit the track until the final days of the sport’s first private shakedown in Barcelona.

Credit: Formula One

The news broke on Monday, 26th January 2026, as seven rival teams, including the newly entered Cadillac outfit, began their first high-speed assessments of the radical 2026 technical regulations.

In a concise statement released via social media, the Silverstone-based team clarified its revised schedule: "The AMR26 will be in Barcelona later this week for its shakedown. Our intention is to run Thursday and Friday."

This delay marks a tentative start for the first project designed under the technical leadership of Adrian Newey, who officially assumed the role of Team Principal for the 2026 campaign. While many expected the British marque to use every available second of the five-day Barcelona window to correlate data from its new state-of-the-art wind tunnel, the team has instead opted to remain at its Technology Campus for final assembly and systems checks.

The AMR26 represents a total "clean sheet" design, integrating the team's first exclusive Honda power unit and a complex active aerodynamics package. The decision to skip Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday leaves Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll with a severely compressed testing schedule. With teams permitted a maximum of three days of running across the five-day event, Aston Martin is now betting on a trouble-free Thursday and Friday to maximize its data collection before the official tests in Bahrain next month.

The move has raised immediate questions among paddock observers regarding the team’s preparedness for the 2026 reset. While Red Bull established the early pace on Monday morning, the Aston Martin garages remained shuttered alongside those of Williams, who previously announced they would skip the Barcelona event entirely to focus on car build. For owner Lawrence Stroll, who has invested billions into the new factory and the exclusive Honda partnership, the stakes for this regulatory cycle could not be higher.

Alonso, entering his 23rd season in the sport, has previously described 2026 as his "last chance" to fight for a third world title. The Spaniard’s hopes are pinned on Newey's ability to exploit the "nimble car" regulations better than rival designers.

However, with engine partners Honda already admitting to early hurdles in power unit integration, the two-day delay in Barcelona suggests that the path to the front of the grid remains fraught with technical challenges.

The expectation for the 2026 season was that Aston Martin would leapfrog the traditional "Big Three" by being the first to fully master the active aerodynamics and electrical energy deployment mandated by the new rules. With Newey at the helm and a bespoke wind tunnel at their disposal, the team’s internal projections reportedly targeted the AMR26 as a championship-contending package from the opening round.

However, the current reality in the Barcelona pit lane suggests that Newey’s notoriously aggressive packaging requirements have met with significant manufacturing bottlenecks. The new chassis has reportedly led to complications in cooling and structural access, requiring revisions at the last moment to the rear suspension geometry and engine cover.

For a team transitioning into a full "works" status with Honda, these integration hurdles are perhaps inevitable, but the timing is far from ideal. By missing the initial data-gathering days in Spain, the team is sacrificing valuable correlation time between their simulation tools and the actual asphalt.

This slow start places immense pressure on the engineering staff to ensure that when the AMR26 finally breaks its silence on Thursday, it does so with a degree of reliability that allows Alonso and Stroll to make up for lost ground.