The first official 2026 F1 test revealed that Aston Martin is on the back foot — and that’s probably an understatement. The Adrian Newey Aston Martin era was heralded as a breakthrough for the Silverstone-based team by much of the F1 media. But I didn’t see it that way. Indeed, the media couldn’t contain their excitement when the AMR26 was revealed during unofficial testing in Barcelona.

The AMR26 received glowing tributes; the media were amazed by the concepts clearly visible on the car. But in engineering, new concepts need to be fully understood, and benchmarking using high-performance computing clusters and AI-driven flow dynamics modeling will never match real-world testing.

In a computer, you can make anything appear ten seconds a lap faster, no matter how good your software or hardware tools are. The correlation between digital and real-world testing is improving, but it is no match for time spent on track.

It’s difficult to say exactly what tools Aston Martin have at their disposal, but we do know they need a new wind tunnel. And we do know they have Adrian Newey. But Newey has created a complicated car — one that needs development. He has admitted as much, and it seems to be a deliberate strategy.

Newey’s argument is that if you have the “perfect” car, it actually limits the amount of progress that can be made. So he has gone for the nuclear option, designing a car that is proving to pose problems — with the chassis, the power unit, and the handling.

Team ambassador and former F1 driver Pedro de la Rosa admitted during a media briefing in Bahrain that Aston Martin is catching up:

We are catching up. We are learning and we are basically in the part of the process where you are starting to learn about your package and about the new rules. Really, that’s where we are.

We are on this steep learning curve,” De la Rosa told PlanetF1.com and other assembled media in Bahrain on the final day of the first week of testing.

Clearly, we’re behind other people, and that’s clear – but that doesn’t mean that we are [not] achieving now a more decent amount of laps, kilometres. We’re learning. We’re optimising.

We are not in a stage where we are changing the setup to learn, to see what the car has, optimising the setup. We are just keeping the car as it is and just trying to achieve as many laps as possible, doing aero mapping, learning about deployment, about harvesting and all the usual stuff. Basically, nothing new, but a bit behind our programme.

“It won’t be an overnight fix. It’s not a five-minute job. It’s obviously a lot of work involved, a lot of learning, a lot of optimising, but we have the confidence and we have the team, we have the resources. We have everything in place.”

“We have to unlock performance, yes. Everyone is in the same boat, but we are clearly behind. And when you are losing or you’re missing that amount of time, it’s clearly over the overall package. We cannot say it’s this or the other.”

“We don’t know where our limit is either – because we haven’t entered the optimising phase of development.”

“We are just trying to understand what we have and where the regulations sit and where we can push in many areas.”

“So, will it be fixable? I mean, only time will tell. I have the confidence with the people we have, resources, it will be done, even if we are four seconds or whatever off the pace.”