Adrian Newey makes dire new revelation about Aston Martin F1 car batteries

Adrian Newey admits Aston Martin is in “a scary place” in terms of battery availability, with only two available at the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix.

Aston Martin's 2026 campaign has been plagued by reliability woes with the Honda-powered AMR26, with extreme vibrations causing nerve damage fears among Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.

After what the team called power unit issues, Alonso did not take part in FP1 on Friday in Australia, while Stroll did only three laps in the first session. Alonso has come out in FP2 for some laps.

The battery situation means that should one of the batteries become unusable, the car concerned will take no further part in the event.

Newey has also confirmed that there are no further examples in Japan at Honda's base that can be shipped over.

“We’re having continuing problems with the battery,” said Newey.

“So we’ve had a fresh problem with communication internally with the battery to its management system, but the much more underlying problem is the vibration issues that we continue to struggle with. We tried a different solution in Lance’s car today.”

Asked how the rest of the weekend looked, Newey detailed how dire the situation is.

“I think realistically, it’s just trying to manage the problem. We are short on batteries. We have only got two batteries left – the two that are in the cars – so if we lose one of those and then it’s obviously a big problem.

"So we’ve got to be very careful on how we use the batteries.”

Expanding on the theme he said: “We came here with four batteries. We've had conditioning problems or communication problems with two of those batteries, which means, as we sit here today, we've only got two operational batteries.

“That, given our kind of rate of battery damage, is 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.”

Asked if it was possible to have more batteries flown in from Japan he made a remarkable admission: “Unfortunately, not. There aren't any.”

Aston unable to understand rest of AMR26 amid Honda woes

Newey stressed that the ongoing lack of running is hampering the team’s understanding of the rest of the package.

“I think it’s one where you kind of feel a bit powerless, because we’ve clearly got a very significant PU problem,” he said. “And our lack of running then also means that at the same time, we’re not finding out about the car.

“So our information on the car itself is very limited because we’ve done so little running, and particularly, running on low fuel. Fuel acts as a damper to the battery, so Honda have limited us to how much low fuel running we can actually do.

“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 it’s not our problem. But it is our problem, because ultimately, the car is the combination of car and PU.”