Aston Martin's final day of F1 testing over early after six laps
Formula 1

Aston Martin's final day of F1 testing over early after six laps

by Jon Noble
2 min read

Aston Martin's troubled second Formula 1 test in Bahrain came to an early end on Friday, with the team abandoning running after just six laps.

Having missed all but 15 minutes of track action in the first four-hour session of the day - as Aston Martin sat out until shortly before the lunch break to sort out a problem on the AMR26 in the garage - Lance Stroll barely got much more running done in the afternoon.

Having completed two installation laps in the morning, Stroll added just four more laps in the afternoon - a pair of two-lap runs - without registering a single flying lap.

With around two hours and 20 minutes of running remaining, and the AMR26 up on stands in the garage, the team issued a statement saying its programme was done.


Read more: The disastrous Honda F1 spiral that Aston Martin's now trapped in


Aston Martin had been braced for a challenging time already, with engine supplier Honda saying that a lack of spare parts would severely hamper the mileage it could do.

Honda said the run plan for the day would be "very limited and consist only of short stints", which would likely be to ensure that components were not put through too much stress from temperature and repeated running.

But the day turned out worse than expected, as Stroll's six-lap tally has left Aston Martin and Honda facing a huge mountain to climb ahead of the start of the season in Australia next month.

Aston Martin had started testing of its AMR26 late, only joining the first pre-season test at Barcelona on the penultimate day.

But since then things have not run smoothly, as it has encountered repeated reliability problems and both Stroll and Fernando Alonso have expressed concern about the overall potential of its package.

Team representative Pedro de la Rosa was open on Friday that things were not going the way it had hoped, but said it knew which areas it had to improve upon.

"Definitely, we are not where we wanted to be," he told F1TV. "We have been the team with [the] less number of laps during pre-season testing.

"Obviously, we would have preferred to do a lot more, but despite the fact that we haven't done a lot of laps, we have an enormous amount of data to look into and prepare us for Australia."

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