Aston Martin’s disastrous start to the Formula 1 season continued on Friday as a fresh power unit problem forced Fernando Alonso out of opening practice for the Australian Grand Prix and Lance Stroll barely ran at all either.
The squad has come into the 2026 F1 campaign on the backfoot, with severe vibration problems limiting its pre-season running.
The vibrations have not only been shaking the car apart, and triggering reliability problems, but have left drivers Alonso and Stroll battling physical problems with their hands on the steering wheel.
Honda has been working on some emergency contingency measures to try to get things improved for the Melbourne weekend, but it hit trouble before track action began on Friday.
Shortly before opening practice, Aston Martin said that Alonso would be unable to take part in the session at Albert Park because of an issue that had been found earlier.
A short statement issued by the team said: “We found a suspected PU related issue which will prevent Fernando to participate in FP1.”
While Stroll at least made it onto the track, his session barely any better.
Stroll’s FP1 amounted to just three laps on a single run early on that included his outlap and inlap.
He completed just one ‘timed’ lap which was almost half a minute off the pace at that time as Stroll began it under virtual safety car conditions and backed off around the lap to make a gap to the car ahead too.
Aston Martin kept him out to start lap three – which seemed to be one lap more than the initial run plan based on Stroll’s response – to get some more data running at a clearly limited speed.
He returned to the garage for the remainder of the session and did not emerge again, with Aston Martin confirming he had suffered an engine problem and his FP1 was over with just over 10 minutes still to go.
While the start of Aston Martin’s relationship with Honda has got off to a troubled start, team principal Adrian Newey remains adamant that progress can be made over the course of the season.
However, he did not shy away from the major problems that the squad faces at the moment – with the Honda power unit both unreliable and lacking performance.
Newey said: “One of the problems with 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’s gone flat.
“So it becomes a self-fulfilling downward spiral.”
