Lance Stroll says the 2026 Aston Martin Formula 1 car looks up to four and a half seconds off the leading teams in Bahrain testing.
The design of the first Adrian Newey-designed Aston Martin caught the eye when it eventually made its track debut in the 'shakedown week' test at Barcelona a fortnight ago.
But it began that test late, on the fourth day of five, with Stroll registering just four laps as he gave the AMR26 its track debut before grinding to a halt.
Stroll completed 36 laps on the first day of this week's first Bahrain test, although only three of those were added after the lunchbreak as a result of engine partner Honda - which it has been suggested is on the back foot compared to its rivals - detecting a data anomaly that it said required further analysis.
Team-mate Fernando Alonso did complete more than 50 laps in the car on Thursday morning but his best time was more than 4.6 seconds off Ferrari pacesetter Charles Leclerc's fastest lap of 1m34.273s.
Asked by The Race how much he thought Aston Martin could catch up by in the three weeks until the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, Stroll said: "I don't know. I mean, right now we look like we're four seconds off the top teams, four and a half seconds.
"[It's] impossible to know what fuel loads and everything people are running, but, yeah, now we need to try and find four seconds of performance, so we'll see."
Alonso suggested at Aston Martin's launch event last week that it could start the season "a bit behind its rivals" but that this would not define its year.
But even so, and regardless of whether he was simply reading from the timing screen in his assessment, in the context of how much the start of the new rules era - and the arrival of Newey - had been talked up as Aston Martin's big opportunity, Stroll's stance represents a bleak outlook.
Asked by The Race how the car felt on downshifts, Stroll said "it's not great at the moment, that's for sure" and, in a sequence of short-response answers to subsequent questions, added that "time will tell" whether that was just a case of Aston Martin's lack of mileage or something deeper, and said one positive was "it's sunny outside. Weather's nice. Better than UK weather".
"It's a combination of things. Engine, balance, grip. It's not one thing. It's a combination," he said, when asked about the "issues" that he'd referred to Aston Martin having at present.
And asked by The Race where the laptime could be found - including whether that could be through problem-solving or upgrades - Stroll added: "I don't think it falls from the sky, you know?
"You have to improve and find performance in the car, in the engine; these are just usual things in F1, when you're behind the competition, you have to think about ways to extract more from the package you have, and at the same time also improve.
"No one stands still in this business, everyone is trying to find performance in every way, every weekend, all the time, so we're doing that, we're trying to extract more performance every day from the car and think also longer-term, bring upgrades on the PU side, on the chassis side.
"We will see in Australia where we line up and then we will see throughout the season how we progress. We're pushing as hard as we can, and that's all we can do right now."
