Scott Gulbransen
Last August at the Goodwood Festival of Speed — a massive annual car show in England where F1 royalty tends to show up — Riccardo Patrese had a conversation with Adrian Newey that he couldn’t shake. Patrese raced for Newey at Williams back in the early ’90s, so when he talks about the guy, it lands differently than your typical pundit.
What Adrian Newey told him wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t nothing. His new team probably wouldn’t be ready. Not for a title fight. Not in 2026.
“I spoke with Adrian at Goodwood, and he feels that next year they won’t be ready,” Patrese said. “Probably in his heart, he hopes to be ready already next year, but he doesn’t want to say that.”
He wasn’t being modest. He was being straight with his old friend.
Adrian Newey and Aston Martin Challenges Create Headlines
Jump to Bahrain two weeks ago, the final day of pre-season testing, 10 days before this week’s Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. Lance Stroll got in the car and managed six laps. The AMR26 hadn’t moved for the first two hours of the morning, while every other team on the grid was out there working. When Stroll finally rolled out, there was a hard lock-up into Turn 4, the car skated through the gravel, and that was basically it. Trucks loaded. The team went home early.
Six laps on the last day of testing before the season starts. That’s the whole story.
The culprit is Honda’s power unit — specifically the battery system inside it. Parts have been burning through faster than the team can replace them during both weeks of testing. One paddock source described the components being “destroyed.” Honda issued a statement Friday morning, copping to a parts shortage and, in a remarkable admission for a manufacturer 10 days out from a season opener, said they weren’t satisfied with the engine’s reliability or its outright performance. That second part is the one worth worrying about.
Honda Power Unit Problems Come at Worst Possible Time
Here’s why. The 2026 regulations are the biggest rules shakeup F1 has seen in years. These new cars pull roughly half their total horsepower from an electric motor, which means the battery has to constantly absorb energy under braking and release it back under acceleration. If that system doesn’t work right, you’re not just unreliable — you’re slow in a way no aerodynamic trick can fix.
“If they have to lose six months of the season before they get close to the right engine package, their season is over.”
Riccardo Patrese
Adrian Newey reportedly told an F1 commission meeting that Honda’s unit can’t even hit the minimum energy recovery threshold of 250kW, well short of the 350kW figure that would make the package competitive. That’s not a setup issue. That’s a fundamental hole in the car.
Patrese had already heard as much.
“Adrian Newey seems lost,” he said. “But I think the biggest problem is Honda. I read that for at least six or seven months, they won’t be able to have an engine that works properly because they burn the battery, and the kilowatts that the battery is capable of providing are not enough.”
Six or seven months. There are 24 races this season. Fernando Alonso is 44 and hasn’t won since 2013. Do the math.
Aston Martin Already Far Behind with No Relief in Sight
The raw numbers make it worse. Stroll and Alonso combined for 334 laps across six days in Bahrain — more than 250 fewer than Cadillac, a brand-new American team running in F1 for the first time. Neither driver completed a race simulation, which is basically a full-length practice run teams use to understand tire wear and fuel behavior over a race distance. Not a bonus exercise. Required homework.
“The main challenge has been dealing with some reliability issues that have limited our time on track,” said chief trackside officer Mike Krack. That might be the understatement of the entire pre-season.
What stings is how intentionally this team was built for exactly this moment. Lawrence Stroll spent years and enormous sums of money constructing a new factory at Silverstone, locking up Honda as an exclusive engine partner, and, most importantly, convincing Newey to leave Red Bull, where he’d just overseen four straight Verstappen championships. The 2026 reset was the plan. New rules, clean slate, Newey at the drawing board.
“I’d say it’s a massive disaster and a total surprise at the same time,” former driver Ralf Schumacher said last week. “After what they achieved with Red Bull, Honda seemed incredible. It was a ‘safe bet.'”
Patrese isn’t calling it that anymore.
“If they have to lose six months of the season before they get close to the right engine package, their season is over,” he said. The man who spent last summer insisting Aston Martin had all the right ingredients is now using the phrase “season is over.” That shift matters.
Pedro de la Rosa, who did most of the media work in Bahrain while Newey stayed out of sight, said, “We’re not happy. But it’s true as well to say that no one is worried. It’s different.”
Maybe. But the F1 Australian Grand Prix is this week, the car has no race sim in the bank, and the engine supplier is publicly short on parts and answers.
Patrese told us in August that this was coming for Aston Martin. He just didn’t know how right he was.
