Aston Martin boss Adrian Newey has revealed his team have been on the "back foot" by four months.
Formula 1's biggest regulation changes ever could lead to a shake-up in the pecking order, with Aston Martin tipped to potentially make a big leap forward under the influence of design genius Newey, who has helped create 15 championship-winning cars.
F1 teams have been allowed to work on their 2026 machines since January 2025, and longer on the power unit side, but Aston Martin have already been playing catch-up and were late to last week's Barcelona Shakedown.
"The AMR Technology Campus is still evolving, the CoreWeave Wind Tunnel wasn't on song until April, and I only joined the team last March, so we've started from behind, in truth. It's been a very compressed timescale and an extremely busy 10 months," Newey said on .
"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.
"That put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle. The car only came together at the last minute, which is why we were fighting to make it to the Barcelona Shakedown."
Aston Martin completed just 65 laps in Barcelona - the least of the 10 teams that ran there, with Williams missing the entire event.
But, when Aston Martin rolled their car out on the penultimate day in black, it gathered plenty of attention as the car design was different from the rest of the grid, with aggressive bodywork to redirect airflow.
Newey said: "I never look at any of my designs as aggressive. I just get on with things and pursue what we feel is the right direction.
"The direction we've taken could certainly be interpreted as aggressive. It's got quite a few features that haven't necessarily been done before. Does that make it aggressive? Possibly. Possibly not."
A big development race always plays out during a first season with new regulations as teams understand the nuances of their cars and add significant upgrades to find performance.
It is an area Red Bull generally excelled at during Newey's 18-year tenure there, with Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen both winning four straight drivers' titles.
Newey says the AMR26 is "tightly packaged, more than Aston Martin's previous six F1 cars since they joined F1 in 2020.
"We've attempted to build something that we hope will have quite a lot of development potential," he said.
"What you want to try to avoid is a car that comes out quite optimised within its window but lacks a lot of development potential.
"We've tried to do the opposite, which is why we've really focused on the fundamentals, put our effort into those, knowing that some of the appendages - wings, bodywork, things that can be changed in season - will hopefully have development potential."
The introduction of new regulations means there is a robust schedule of three separate testing events before the start of the 2026 season.
With the closed Barcelona Shakedown now complete, F1 will next head to Bahrain for two 'official' pre-season tests, when media will be present and live timing from the circuit available.
Two three-day Bahrain tests take place on February 11-13 and 18-20.
The teams then have two weeks to prepare for the opening round of the season, which is the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne from March 6-8.
The first practice sessions of the season will take place on Friday March 6, with Qualifying on Saturday March 7 and the opening race on Sunday March 8.
Watch every race of the 2026 F1 season live on Your Site, starting with the Australian Grand Prix from March 6-8.
