Adrian Newey has revealed that Aston Martin has no more spare batteries for its Honda powertrains at the Australian Grand Prix, and that he feels “powerless” amid the current situation the team is in for 2026.
Aston Martin has endured an arduous prelude to the 2026 season, with its key issues traced to Honda’s powertrain – which produces excessive vibrations when in operation.
These vibrations have been causing battery failures, and Aston Martin has stationed a number of its staff at Honda’s Sakura facilities in an effort to help enact a turnaround.
Similar issues had caused the team to scale back on its running in the Bahrain test. During the final day, Fernando Alonso had been on a long run before being told to stop on-track, and Lance Stroll only did a handful of laps that afternoon.
Running was at a premium once more during FP1 in Melbourne, as Stroll managed just three laps of the Albert Park circuit and Alonso did not get out of the garage at all. Newey, Aston Martin’s team principal, stated that a new issue had emerged on arrival in Australia.
“We’ve had a fresh problem of communication internally with the battery to its management system,” he explained.
“But the underlying, the much more underlying problem is the vibration issues that we continue to struggle with.
Lance Stroll, Aston Martin
Photo by: William West – AFP – Getty Images
“We tried a different solution in Lance’s car today. There’s some analysis going on as we speak as to whether that’s helped or not and then depending on that analysis we’ll define what we do for FP2.
“I think realistically it’s just trying to manage the problem. We are short on batteries. We’ve only got two batteries left, the two that are in the car.
“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 added that Honda had restricted the amount of low-fuel running that the car can do, exacerbating Aston Martin’s meagre lap count as the team was struggling to find out more about the car.
However, Newey was adamant that his team could work with Honda to find a fix for the rest of the year.
“I think it’s one where I kind of feel a bit powerless, because we’ve clearly got a very significant PU problem and our lack of running then also means at the same time we’re not finding out about the car,” Newey added.
“Our information on the car itself is very limited because we’ve done so little running and particularly running at low fuel.
Adrian Newey, Aston Martin Racing
Photo by: Kym Illman / Getty Images
“Fuel acts as a damper to the battery, so Honda have limited us very much to how much low fuel running we can do. So it just becomes a self-feeding problem and of course it’s using a lot of energy – in the human sense, as opposed to the kilowatt sense – on our part to try to work with Honda and to produce the best overall solution.
“We can turn around and say ‘well it’s not our problem’ but this is our problem, because ultimately the car is a combination of chassis and PU.”
Newey stated that the aim was still to get both cars on the grid, but that the battery challenges had left the team in a “scary place” for the rest of the weekend.
He added that there was no opportunity to source any further batteries from Honda, stating simply that “there aren’t any” left for the team to use beyond the two remaining units.
“Given our rate of battery damage, it’s 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.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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