Aston Martin stuck in garage amid shortage of Honda engine parts

Rebecca French

2 months ago

Aston Martin’s 2026 Formula One car remained in the garage in Bahrain on Friday for pre-season testing due to early technical issues.

Aston Martin is the only team using Japanese power units after switching to Honda engines in F1’s new era, but has struggled so far.

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Despite its mediocre speed, the AMR26’s unreliability has been Sakhir’s biggest problem.

The Adrian Newey-designed car spent four hours in the garage on Wednesday due to powerplant issues; when Lance Stroll finally started the team’s afternoon session, he quickly found himself in a gravel trap as he suffered what looked more like a technical glitch than driver error.

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Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing

Fernando Alonso suffered another power unit problem on Thursday, disrupting his afternoon training session.

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Honda and team ambassador Pedro de la Rosa revealed that as of 1pm local time on Friday, the Aston car had not returned to the track, which was partly related to parts shortages.

Honda said on social media: “Battery-related issues arose in our final race yesterday with Fernando Alonso, impacting our testing program with the Aston Martin F1 Team.”

“Since then we have been conducting simulations on HRC Sakura’s test bench. Due to this and the shortage of power unit parts, we have made very limited adjustments to today’s run schedule and only include short-term runs.”

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De la Rosa confirmed Honda’s diagnosis and Aston’s subsequent backup plan.

“Yesterday, Fernando’s car had some battery issues, so Honda was doing test simulations on the test bench in Sakura,” the former grand prix driver told F1 TV.

“Because of that fact, and the fact that we’re short on parts, we’re going to be doing very limited runs today. They’re going to be short, and they’re going to be at least a half hour apart so we can really study the data and be able to test some things on those few runs. But, yeah, we’re definitely not going to be doing long runs today.”

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Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing

The setback compounds Aston’s problems. The AMR26’s 1m35.974s test benchmark is 1.4 seconds slower than all but the new Cadillac fleet.

“There’s no doubt that we didn’t achieve where we wanted to,” De La Rosa admitted. “We have always been a team [the least] Laps during pre-season testing. Obviously we’d rather do more, but even though we didn’t do a lot of laps, we had a lot of data to look at and prepare for Australia.

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“It’s a new set of rules, everything is new. We have a new partner with Honda, a new gearbox, new rear suspension. We actually have a good understanding of a lot of things and we really know where and what areas of the car we need to focus on.

“So it’s not what we wanted. We would have liked to have done a few more laps, but the number of laps we’ve done shows us the way forward. So there’s a lot of work to be done behind the scenes.”

Asked if the start to the 2026 F1 season would be tricky, De La Rosa replied: “Yes, of course. I mean, when you start poorly, things are always more difficult.”

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“But, you know, we’ve got great partners. We’ve got Honda, we’ve got a great campus and people are pulling out all the stops to try and get us the best compromise for Australia. It’s just us working hard based on what we’ve learned so far in pre-season and go from there. It’s been a long journey and a long season, but we still have our work cut out for us.”