Problems upon problems
There doesn’t seem to be any light on the horizon for the Aston Martin team in Australia, quite the opposite. After the resounding flop of FP1, in which Fernando Alonso did not complete even one lap and Lance Stroll was able to finish just 3 laps, setting a time thirty seconds slower than the leader’s, the situation seems destined to get even worse for the rest of the weekend. In the press conference, in fact, the team principal and designer of the Silverstone team, Adrian Newey, revealed that the team is – literally – running out of parts.
Read more GP Australia 2026: FP2 report
The problems in the first free practice session indeed concerned the Honda power unit and specifically the batteries. The problem is that the team owned by Lawrence Stroll has four batteries available and two are already ‘gone’. Therefore, only two remain, which are the ones currently in Stroll and Alonso’s cars. If one of the two – or both – were to break, that car’s weekend would be over.
Worrying words
“We continue to have problems with the battery – Adrian Newey confirmed to journalists – so we had a new problem, if you will, which also concerns the internal communication between the battery and its management system. But the most serious problem is the vibrations, which we continue to struggle with. So today we tried a different solution on Lance’s car. As we speak, some analyses are underway to understand if this helped or not and, based on those analyses, we will define what to do in the next sessions”.
“We are short on batteries – Newey added further – we only have two left, the ones that are in the car. So, if we lose one, obviously it’s a big problem. We therefore have to be very careful about how we use the batteries. The critical point is the number of batteries. We arrived here with four batteries. We had conditioning or communication problems with two of these batteries, which means that, at the moment, we only have two working batteries. Considering our battery damage rate, it is a rather worrying situation – he concluded – obviously we hope to be able to get through the weekend, field two cars and so on. But at the moment it is very difficult to be concrete about it“.
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