Adrian Newey revealed Aston Martin were on the back foot developing the AMR26

Aston Martin's 2026 Formula 1 car, the Honda-powered AMR26, made its debut in Barcelona on the penultimate day of the test and just ran five laps before Fernando Alonso put it through its paces on the final day.

Many reckoned that was due to Newey's approach of continuing the development till the final moment possible, which delays signing off on the design of some parts and consequently their production.

But Newey revealed there were other reasons why the AMR26 was late, and those were due to the team's new headquarters still getting up to speed.

He told Aston Martin F1 Team's official website: "2026 is probably the first time in the history of F1 that the power unit regulations and chassis regulations have changed at the same time. It's a completely new set of rules, which is a big challenge for all the teams, but perhaps more so for us.

"The AMR Technology Campus is still evolving," Newey pointed out. "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.

"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," the Briton estimated, "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."

Asked whether the process made him nervous, Newey responded: "Whenever a car is about to hit the track for the first time, it's always a nervous moment.

"The team put in a huge amount of work to get the car ready. There's more to come—and lots to learn—but those first couple of days at the track have been important to start building an understanding of how the car behaves and complete those all-important first systems checks before pre-season testing in Bahrain," he explained.

The AMR26 must have been the most anticipated car of the 2026 F1 season, and it turned heads when it made its track debut, many believing the Newey has yet delivered another design masterpiece.

But will it be competitive? Newey hopes so; he said: "We've attempted to build something that we hope will have quite a lot of development potential.

"What you want to try to avoid is a car that comes out quite optimized 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," he explained.