2026 Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team

[SealTheRealDeal]

If the rumour that they won't run until Thursday is true,

This has been confirmed by the team

Oh dear...

[madridista]

There's plenty of cliffs around you guys can jump off of if needed. The car hasn't even run on track yet...

Agree. The delay is apparently in logistics/assembly. The one or two days they lose wont be what makes the difference, they will have 3+3 additional full days in Bahrain in (guaranteed) dry conditions to test everything with a weeks time inbetween , and another 2 weeks to the race. You can only get so much data. What i learned is that the windtunnel numbers and the car in general look promising, from multiple credible sources.

Just fearmongering PR from Italian media and Planetf1 twisting of Honda quotes at the moment.

[WardenOfTheNorth]

I believe that even with a fully camouflaged livery, the teams are still required by the regulations to display the driver's number on the nose of the car.

This is correct. Article 9.2 states "Each car will carry the competition number of its driver, as published by the FIA, which must be clearly visible from the front of the car and on the driver's helmet"

And then Article 10.2 specifies that this includes testing and promotional events.

[madridista]

"The Aston Martin AMR26 will arrive at
@Circuitcat_es
on Wednesday morning. They will have just finished assembling parts on it that same day, and the plan is for it to hit the track on Thursday.

Newey has pushed the development of certain parts to the very last minute, changing them at the eleventh hour because he believed he had found improvements."

[bigblue]

From the outside, and admittedly I've never been involved with F1(!), this strikes me as a bit odd. Either you miss the first test and rock-up at Bahrain a couple of weeks later, having pushed development on for another couple of weeks and not bothered to develop and construct some effectively temporary parts, or you make this first test. Gaining a day or two, but reducing days on track intentionally seems like an own-goal. Surely you'd rather have the shake-down and begin to get the feel of things, even if very marginally less developed, than get this day or two extension. I guess if you were pushing things to the last minute and miscalculated by a bit, that would explain, but not excuse it?

Just thinking aloud for fun and interest, while we wait

[CHT]

There's plenty of cliffs around you guys can jump off of if needed. The car hasn't even run on track yet...

Agree. The delay is apparently in logistics/assembly. The one or two days they lose wont be what makes the difference, they will have 3+3 additional full days in Bahrain in (guaranteed) dry conditions to test everything with a weeks time inbetween , and another 2 weeks to the race. You can only get so much data. What i learned is that the windtunnel numbers and the car in general look promising, from multiple credible sources.

Just fearmongering PR from Italian media and Planetf1 twisting of Honda quotes at the moment.

Even if its true, logistic and assembly problem reflect poorly on the team internal operation. Team cant possibly be competing in championship with such sloppy internal operation.

Losing 2 days of track time means, 300 engineers at the factory are still living in the dark not knowing how their design concept, PU, parts will run on track. Teams and drivers who have done the testing are already getting their engineers working at the factory on improvement. 300 engineers x 24 hours = 7200 of potential engineering hours per day

Its not a small thing in F1, especially if the aim is to win races.