Terrible debut for the AMR26 2.0
There was huge anticipation in Hungary for the debut of the so-called ‘version two’ of the Aston Martin AMR26. The Silverstone team brought a flood of updates for this Grand Prix, forcing the mechanics to essentially build a completely new car from scratch which – in the expectations of Adrian Newey and the team – should allow them to solve at least some of the reliability and competitiveness problems that have plagued the English team in the first half of the season, making the green cars the tail-enders of this new F1.
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Lance Stroll has parked up with what looks like a broken rear suspension 👀
🔴 RED FLAG 🔴#F1 #HungarianGP pic.twitter.com/4aC6C0yXAd
— Formula 1 (@F1) July 24, 2026
The start of the weekend, however, was far from ideal for the Silverstone team. In the final phase of FP1, a serious and worrying sudden failure of the left rear suspension was recorded on Lance Stroll’s car. Fortunately, the problem occurred in the first sector, in a low-speed section, and Stroll was able to avoid crashing into the barriers, ‘holding’ the car and then parking it at the side of the track once he understood what the problem was.
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Certainly, however, seeing such a problem on the debut day of the ‘2.0’ version of the car is not a very encouraging message, quite the opposite. It will be interesting to see if Aston Martin provides an official explanation of what happened, but this is certainly not the ‘second debut’ Adrian Newey was expecting. A single free practice session is perhaps too little to evaluate the effectiveness of these updates, but also in terms of the image conveyed externally, the situation of Lawrence Stroll’s team does not seem destined to improve in the short term.
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