Adrian Newey claims AMR26 is ‘fifth-best’ chassis despite Melbourne woes

Adrian Newey believes that on the chassis side, the Aston Martin AMR26 is maximum one second slower than the F1 2026 leading pace.

Newey spoke of “tremendous development potential” in the AMR26, a car with the possibility to “be up front” at some stage this season, and one which would have been “significantly” faster had Aston Martin had time to bring its latest work to the car in time for Melbourne. Aston Martin has been battling further reliability issues with the Honda engine in Melbourne.

Adrian Newey talks up Aston Martin AMR26 chassis

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The alarm bells were ringing for Aston Martin at the start of the first F1 2026 race weekend in Melbourne. Fernando Alonso missed the entirety of FP1, and Newey revealed that only two of the four Honda batteries remained operational, those the ones in the cars driven by Alonso and Lance Stroll.

Aston Martin has increased its lap count and pace during practice, but, the reliability gremlins have not cleared up. Stroll’s FP2 was brought to an early end, and the Canadian missed FP3 due to a suspected Internal Combustion Engine issue.

Alonso ended FP3 3.667s off George Russell’s very comfortable leading pace in the Mercedes.

Newey sees great potential in the AMR26.

Speaking alongside Honda Racing boss Koji Watanabe ahead of the Melbourne race weekend, Newey told PlanetF1.com and others: “On the chassis side, I think it’s well known that we faced a very condensed period of development. We didn’t get a model into the windtunnel until mid-April, so quite a long way behind our competitors. That’s just a fact of life.

“So what we tried to concentrate on was having a good, sound architectural package. By architectural package, I mean the parts that we can’t easily change in-season. I think we’ve achieved that.

“I look at our package, and I don’t feel as if we particularly missed anything. So therefore, I believe that the car has huge, tremendous development potential in it.

“It will take, of course, a few races for us to fully realise that potential. We’ve got a quite aggressive development plan underway.

“So I think it’s fair to say that here in Melbourne, we are a bit behind the leaders. Probably I would say we’re maybe the fifth-best team, so sort of potential Q3 qualifiers, on the chassis side. Obviously, not where we want to be, but with the potential to be up front at some point in the season.”

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Further talking up the AMR26 chassis, Newey said that it will become clear in Melbourne where Honda is at for pure power on the engine side.

“Divide it up into chassis, as I say, I could be horribly wrong, but my assessment would be that we are, from a chassis performance view, kind of in that middle group,” said Newey, “so definitely behind the leaders.

“What’s that gap? I don’t know. I’m guessing somewhere around three quarters of a second, maybe a second.

“We have an aggressive development plan in place already. With what we have, where we’ve got to in the factory with that development plan, had we had time to bring it here to Melbourne, we would be significantly ahead of where we will be over the weekend. Hopefully, at the moment, that’s all quite a good trajectory.

“So given a bit of time, I see no inherent reason within the architecture of the car why we can’t become, on the chassis side, close to, if not fully competitive.

“I think on the PU side, if we simply talk about kilowatts, pure raw power, then there’s no point in speculating, because once we have GPS and sound analysis from the Formula 1 TV coming in over the weekend, then that’s very easy for FOM, the teams, etc, to measure, to quite a high degree of accuracy, what power each PU is producing.

“And from that, of course, you can then start to work out the lap time deficit.

“One of the problems of these regulations is that the shorter you are on ICE power, the more you have to make up for using electrical energy to cover for that lack of ICE power, which means that by the time you really want that electrical energy on the straights, your battery has gone flat. So it becomes a self fulfilling downward spiral.

“So a straightforward sort of calculation of what ICE power means on lap time, is compounded by the effect of lack of electrical energy.

“As I say, there’s no point in speculating, because we’ll find out, particularly on Saturday, when everybody has their engines at full beans.”

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