Five seconds off the pace - Aston Martin's dire situation unmasked in practice

Aston Martin's dire situation before the first race of the season was laid bare when they finished practice 4.9 seconds off the pace.

And team principal Adrian Newey revealed that all the problems had left their legendary driver Fernando Alonso in a "hard mental place".

The continuing issues around the team are one of the biggest stories of the new season, particularly as their signing of design great Newey and engine partnership with Honda had created great expectations for 2026.

But Aston Martin, who ended the first day of practice for the Australian Grand Prix nearly five seconds off the pace having done only 17 laps, remain beset by continuing reliability problems with their Honda engine which are preventing any meaningful running.

Last year, the field was covered by not much more than a second from front to back.

But this sort of margin is not unusual in the context of either the history of F1, or a major regulation change, when gaps between teams tend to expand.

In modern history, the British racing car manufacturer Lola faced an 11-second deficit when it launched a new team in 1997. It survived for only one race.

But for a team of this profile, funded by a Canadian billionaire, with an engine produced by one of the world's most respected automotive companies, with two all-time greats designing and driving the car, it is an unacceptable deficit. And an unsustainable one.

On Thursday, it was revealed that Alonso and fellow driver Lance Stroll were at risk of nerve damage because of the vibrations from their Honda engines.

It remains highly uncertain that the car is capable of completing Sunday's grand prix amid all the issues.

Spanish two-time world champion Alonso was not able to run in first practice because of a problem with his Honda power-unit.

Alonso, 44, has already been in a similar situation with Honda at McLaren from 2015-17, when the engine was unreliable and uncompetitive for three years before the two parties split.

Newey said: "Fernando is one of the true greats. His ability, his talent, his all-round capability, he should have won, in truth, far more than the two championships he has to his name and however many races wins (32)."

On his age, he added: "Talking to him, he doesn't think he's suffering in any way. His eyesight is still very good. His reactions, he's very proud of the fact he was the fastest starter last year, in reaction time. So, he's an amazing person.

"We've been trying to contain our hopes because we knew this was going to be a difficult year, a build year. We started very late and on a very compressed cycle on the chassis side, but we knew that meant in the first half of the season we would be able to catch back up and we would very much have done without the distraction that's now caused.

"For Fernando, it's a hard mental place to be in at the moment."

Newey's Red Bull cars prevented Alonso winning at least two further championships, when he was at Ferrari in 2010 and 2012, and the two have long wanted to work together.

Aston Martin signed to become Honda's works partner in May 2023, while the Japanese company was in the course of four consecutive drivers' titles and two constructors' championships with Red Bull.

Newey, a design legend regarded as the finest aerodynamic engineer in F1 history, said Honda's problems were founded in its decision to quit F1 in 2021, only to change its mind on the basis of the new rules that are being introduced this year.

Newey, who joined Aston Martin in March last year, said he and the team did not know about Honda's problems until November, when he, team owner Lawrence Stroll and chief strategy officer Andy Cowell visited Honda's base in Tokyo "to discuss rumours" that the Japanese company "wouldn't achieve" their "original target power".

He added: "Out of that came the fact that many of the original workforce had not returned when they restarted.

"When they reformed, a lot of the original group had it now transpires disbanded and gone to work on solar panels or whatever.

"A lot of the group were new to F1 and didn't have the experience they had previous.

"Plus, when they came back in 2023 that was the first year of the budget cap for engines.

"All their rivals had been developing away through 2021-2022, with continuity, existing team and free of budget cap.

"They re-entered with, let's say, only, I'm guessing, 30% of their original base staff and now in a budget cap era so they started very much on the back foot and unfortunately they have not been able to catch up."

Newey said the current problems are rooted in vibrations from the engine affecting the batteries of the hybrid system. There are only two of those left for the rest of the weekend in Melbourne.

"If we lose one of those then it's obviously a big problem. So we've got to be very careful on how we use the batteries," he said.

"We came here with four batteries. We've had conditioning problems or communication problems with two of those batteries, which means as we sit here today, we've only got two operational batteries. And that, given our kind of rate of battery damage, is quite a scary place to be in.

"Obviously, we're hopeful that we can get through the weekend and start two cars and so on and so forth, but it's very difficult to be concrete at the moment about that."

Newey said that, from his point of view, "I kind of feel a bit powerless because we've clearly got a very significant power-unit problem.

"And our lack of running then also means, at the same time, we're not finding out about the car. So our information on the car itself is very limited because we've done so little running.

"Particularly running at low fuel because running at low fuel… fuel acts as a damper to the battery. So Honda have limited us very much to how much low-fuel running we can do. It just becomes a self-feeding problem. And of course, it's using a lot of energy in the human sense to try to work with Honda and produce the best overall solution."