Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll propped up the field in sprint qualifying at Silverstone on Saturday, finishing 21st and 22nd respectively – more than 3.5 seconds adrift of Lewis Hamilton‘s pole-setting Ferrari. For most teams, that would be a crisis. For Aston Martin right now, it was almost beside the point.
Adrian Newey spoke to Sky Sports F1 on the sprint grid and made no attempt to dress up where the team stands. The AMR26 has scored a single championship point across eight rounds in 2026, and the car that arrived at Silverstone is not the car the team believes it can build. Newey’s message was straightforward: don’t judge us yet. “A first phase of upgrades will arrive for Hungary and another one along with the Honda engine in Zandvoort,” he said.
The package Newey has been building toward is substantial. Per his own description to Sky Sports, the team has re-homologated and crash-tested a revised forward chassis after extracting meaningful weight from it, developed a new nose, and substantially reworked the aerodynamic surfaces. The rear suspension has been revised, though the core structure – gearbox architecture and chassis fundamentals – stays in place. Newey described it as “a big aerodynamic package coupled with significant weight reduction.”
One race later at Zandvoort, Honda brings its sole permitted mid-season power unit upgrade, targeting combustion chamber and pre-chamber improvements according to Honda’s general trackside manager Shintaro Orihara. The FIA’s ADUO regulations allow Honda two upgrades this season, and the Zandvoort unit represents their only mid-season token.
The decision to bank everything on a single large Hungary package rather than drip-feed incremental updates was, in Newey’s words, “painful but correct.” While that call has left Aston Martin getting eclipsed even by Cadillac – a team that didn’t exist in F1 twelve months ago – he argues the long-term logic holds.
Adrian Newey spoke to Sky Sports F1 on the sprint grid and made no attempt to dress up where the team stands. The AMR26 has scored a single championship point across eight rounds in 2026, and the car that arrived at Silverstone is not the car the team believes it can build. Newey’s message was straightforward: don’t judge us yet. “A first phase of upgrades will arrive for Hungary and another one along with the Honda engine in Zandvoort,” he said.
The package Newey has been building toward is substantial. Per his own description to Sky Sports, the team has re-homologated and crash-tested a revised forward chassis after extracting meaningful weight from it, developed a new nose, and substantially reworked the aerodynamic surfaces. The rear suspension has been revised, though the core structure – gearbox architecture and chassis fundamentals – stays in place. Newey described it as “a big aerodynamic package coupled with significant weight reduction.”
One race later at Zandvoort, Honda brings its sole permitted mid-season power unit upgrade, targeting combustion chamber and pre-chamber improvements according to Honda’s general trackside manager Shintaro Orihara. The FIA’s ADUO regulations allow Honda two upgrades this season, and the Zandvoort unit represents their only mid-season token.
The decision to bank everything on a single large Hungary package rather than drip-feed incremental updates was, in Newey’s words, “painful but correct.” While that call has left Aston Martin getting eclipsed even by Cadillac – a team that didn’t exist in F1 twelve months ago – he argues the long-term logic holds.
3 months ago
