De la Rosa admits Aston Martin ‘not where we want to be’ as he opens up on team’s pre-season

Aston Martin Team Representative Pedro de la Rosa has made clear that Aston Martin are “not where they want to be” amid a difficult pre-season period, with the squad working “flat-out” to get on top of their issues.

After debuting the new Honda-powered AMR26 late at the Barcelona Shakedown, Aston Martin have faced various reliability problems across the two Bahrain pre-season tests, limiting their mileage and data gathering.

The latest problem led to Fernando Alonso stopping out on track during Thursday afternoon’s session in Sakhir, with Honda subsequently releasing a statement to explain the cause and how their Friday programme has been impacted.

Expanding on that in a conversation with F1 TV, former F1 driver De la Rosa said: “Yesterday we had some battery issues on Fernando’s car, and therefore Honda is carrying out test simulations on the test bench in Sakura.

“Due to this fact, and also the fact that we have a shortage of parts, we will be doing very limited runs today. They will be short and they will be separated by a minimum of half an hour so that it allows us to really look into the data, and be able to test some things in these few runs. We won’t be doing long runs today, for sure.”

He added: “Definitely we are not where we wanted to be. We have been the team with the [fewest] number of laps during pre-season testing. We would have preferred to do a lot more. But despite the fact that we haven’t done a lot of laps, we have an enormous amount of data to look into and to prepare ourselves for Australia.

“It’s a new set of regulations, everything is new, we have a new partner in Honda, a new gearbox, new rear suspension. There are so many things actually that we already have a good understanding on, and we really know the places and the areas of the car we need to focus on.

“It’s not where we wanted to be, we would have preferred to do a lot more quantity of laps, but the laps we’ve done is showing us a direction for the future. There is a lot of work to be done still behind the scenes.”

As such, De la Rosa and Aston Martin are braced for a challenging start to the 2026 campaign, but the Spaniard emphasised how every department is pulling together to make progress and become a competitive force.

“Yeah, of course it will be [tricky],” he said. “When you start on the back foot, it’s always more difficult. We have great partners, we have Honda, we have a fantastic campus and people working flat-out trying to get us to the best possible compromise for Australia.

“We only have to work hard based on what we have already learned so far this pre-season, which is a lot, and start from there. It’s a long journey, it’s a long season as well, but we still have a mission to be completed.”