De la Rosa admits Aston Martin's Newey chassis is only fifth-fastest at best circuits

Aston Martin team ambassador Pedro de la Rosa has admitted the team’s 2026 car is capable of being only the fifth-fastest chassis on the grid at its best circuits, with the Honda power unit and a fundamental aerodynamic weakness compounding the outfit’s difficult start to F1’s new technical era.

The assessment came in the wake of what de la Rosa described as one of Aston’s worst performance weekends of the season at the Monaco Grand Prix, where the AMR26 suffered severe mid-corner understeer on the principality’s narrow, low-speed layout. The team inherited a single point only after a series of time penalties were handed to rivals.

“I think some circuits we could be fifth-fastest, some others we could be much further down,” de la Rosa said. “Whatever position we are in, it’s a position we’re not happy with. We just have to be patient, because we know that interesting things are coming.”

The AMR26 is the first chassis designed by Adrian Newey since the legendary engineer joined Aston Martin, but its development was severely compressed from the outset. Newey revealed in February that the team’s brand-new wind tunnel was not operational until April 2025 — roughly four months after rivals had begun testing 2026 models following the end of the aero testing ban in January 2024.

“That put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle,” Newey explained at the time.

Aston also switched from customer Mercedes power to a works Honda deal for the new regulations, but the Japanese unit has struggled for both outright performance and reliability, though de la Rosa acknowledged recent progress on the latter front and noted the ADUO deployment mechanism offers some recovery potential on power.

The Monaco weekend laid bare a more immediate concern. Despite exhausting every available set-up option, the team could not resolve the understeer that left both drivers struggling to change direction and point the car through slow corners.

“We were expecting to be a bit better here, but we found a very severe mid-corner understeer in the low-speed corners, which the team has tried to cure, making all possible changes on set-up,” de la Rosa said. “But it is something more fundamental than the set-up change. We didn’t experience this understeer as bad as it has been here in any other race.”

Aston was outqualified by the new Cadillac outfit for only the second time this season in Monaco, underlining the scale of the challenge facing Newey and the Silverstone-based team as they wait for a promised upgrade package to arrive.