Aston Martin’s nightmare continued on the final day of F1 2026 pre-season testing, with problems leaving its AMR26 stranded in the garage and a shortage of parts meaning it can only do “very limited” mileage anyway.
The Silverstone-based squad has had a troubled start to its 2026 preparations, where it has battled a lack of performance and reliability issues throughout early running.
It lost three hours of running on Thursday after Fernando Alonso suffered a battery-related issue that stopped him on track.
Things did not got better on Friday morning, as it failed to make it out of the pits with its AMR26 in the opening hour.
With Lance Stroll at the wheel, the car was fired up in the garage early on, but a suspected problem forced the team to abandon running and work on fixing whatever it was not happy with.
But the wider difficulties the team is in have been laid bare by engine supplier Honda.
The Japanese manufacturer said that in the wake of what it learned from the stoppage on Thursday, allied to how many parts it has burned through this week, the team at best can only complete a compressed programme on the final day.
A statement from Honda said that in the wake of Alonso’s battery-related problem: “We have been carrying out simulations on the test bench in HRC Sakura. Due to this and a shortage of power unit parts, we have adapted today's run plan to be very limited and consist only of short stints.”
Aston Martin team representative Pedro de la Rosa later spoke to F1 TV and said when the car did re-appear it would have 30-minute gaps between stints.
"They will be short and they will be separated by a minimum of half an hour," de la Rosa confirmed. "It will allow us to really look into the data and be able to test some things in these few runs.
"We will not be doing long runs today, for sure."
Aston Martin has not had the week it needed to get itself in good shape for the start of the season, having already had a challenging time in the first Bahrain test.
It is currently bottom of the mileage charts for this week, having completed just 122 laps. This is well adrift of the 301 laps that Mercedes had completed up until Thursday night.
Fernando Alonso was quite clear on Thursday that Aston Martin’s problems were not small.
“There are many things we need to fix, but I know everyone at the track and at the campus is working at 100% capacity to find solutions,” he said.
Charles Leclerc continued Ferrari’s encouraging run in testing in the opening hour on Friday as he topped the times from Kimi Antonelli's Mercedes and Oscar Piastri's McLaren.
Haas’s Esteban Ocon raised some eyebrows as he started a stint with intermediate tyres on the dry track – but it is understood he was doing an experiment of partial aero modes to check ride heights when in a specific active-aero mode where only the front wing is allowed to open.
