Aston Martin Formula 1 team ambassador Pedro de la Rosa claims Aston Martin’s 2026 chassis could be the “fifth-fastest” at its most favourable circuits.
Aston has switched from customer Mercedes engines to a works Honda deal for F1’s new technical era, but the Japanese power unit’s lack of power and reliability has hampered the outfit – despite recent progress on the latter and the ADUO mechanism providing opportunities to bounce back regarding the former.
So what is Adrian Newey’s first-ever Aston chassis really worth? The legendary designer spoke out as early as February, explaining the squad’s brand-new wind tunnel hadn’t been up and running until April 2025.
“The reality is that we didn’t get a model of the ’26 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April, whereas most, if not all of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year,” Newey then stated. “That put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle.”
Hence Aston’s current predicament and de la Rosa’s latest assessment.
“I think some circuits we could be fifth-fastest, some others we could be much further down,” the Spaniard tentatively analysed. “Whatever position we are in, it’s a position we’re not happy with.
“We just have to be patient, because we know that interesting things are coming. We just have to understand the regulations as well as we can, with the current limitations, so that when the new package arrives, we have more tools to extract everything from that.”
Pedro de la Rosa, Aston Martin F1 Team
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
Although it inherited one point following a myriad of time penalties at the Monaco Grand Prix, Aston arguably experienced its worst weekend so far, performance-wise, in the principality. It was outqualified by Cadillac for just the second time, amid crippling understeer on the narrow, winding layout.
“We were expecting to be a bit better here, but we found a very severe mid-corner understeer in the low-speed [corners], which the team has tried to cure, making all possible changes on set-up,” de la Rosa explained. “But it is something more fundamental than the set-up change. We didn’t experience this understeer as bad as it has been here in any other race.
“So that has caught us out. The team has done a great job just changing up and down on set-up, everything you can think about mechanically and aerodynamically, but it hasn’t been enough. The car has remained very difficult, very difficult to really change the direction in the car, and also make it point in the right direction in the low-speed [corners]. That’s where we’ve been losing most of our time here in Monaco.
“That’s where we are at the moment. What are we going to find in the next race? We don’t know, because it’s not something that we have felt this bad in the previous races.”
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing
Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images
Asked if this understeer issue was unlikely to come up again given how unique the Monaco track’s characteristics are, de la Rosa replied: “It’s difficult to say right now.
“As we haven’t seen [this] in circuits that are very different to Monaco, we remain confident that we should first of all analyse all the data that we have from this race, and if we find again this problem, then we’ll have more tools, actually, to work on it.
“But I would be surprised if we find this level of understeer, chronic mid-corner understeer, in any other track, because there’s no track like Monaco.
“And also this year, the soft tyre has been even pretty hard for this circuit, and a lot of teams – including us – have to work very hard the soft front tyres, really, to get them up to temperature. So, I would be surprised if we find these balance issues in the next few races.”
