Aston Martin is the backmarker of the 2026 Formula 1 season.There’s no mincing words.Coming into the championship’s new car-design-regulations era, the British team was surrounded by much hype. Its car would be the brainchild of legendary F1 designer Adrian Newey, and Honda would supply its engines after powering Red Bull to six world titles (drivers’ and constructors’ together) between 2021 and 2024.But Aston badly missed the mark. And the gap to the leading teams had grown steadily larger as the months have passed.Aston’s car, the AMR26, arrived late to the first preseason test, and while it stood out in terms of design compared to the other new rides along pit lane, physical-appearance praise didn’t translate to on-track performance.After its testing in Bahrain was cut short amid various reliability issues and a lack of spare engine parts, the crisis deepened when it was revealed during the season-opening Australian Grand Prix weekend that the team faced a significant engine-battery shortage, and the car had such a severe vibration problem its drivers feared they were risking permanent nerve damage.Honda introduced changes to lessen the vibrations, but the performance gap grew, with 2026 season newcomer Cadillac quickly passing Aston, leaving it at the foot of the constructors’ championship.At the Belgian Grand Prix last week, the slowest Cadillac in qualifying was just over two seconds quicker than the fastest Aston. At the two races before Spa, that gap was almost a second at both Austria’s Red Bull Ring and Silverstone in Britain.Although Aston took the point that should have gone to Cadillac on a chaotic Sunday in Monaco to move off the foot of the constructors’ after six races, it has been playing a waiting game until this weekend’s Hungarian GP, where the team introduced its first major chassis upgrade package.A Honda engine upgrade won’t come until the Dutch GP, which is next on the schedule though not until after F1’s month-long summer break, but the big question is whether Aston will now make a step forward — or continue to languish.“The first races have been a complete nightmare,” Newey, who is also Aston’s team principal, said on Friday. “Hopefully, we can get at least (another) point and respectability now. That is the immediate goal. From there, we can try to keep moving forward.”Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey at a news conference before the 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix. (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)Aston had been on the back foot from the start with this year’s car, Newey revealed in a recent interview posted on the team’s website.“We didn’t start serious work on the 2026 car until mid-March 2025 and didn’t get a model into the wind tunnel until mid‑April,” he said. “That left us several months behind our rivals – and that’s a huge gap to close.”The AMR26 was also overweight, which was partly down to the engine, Newey added, but on the chassis side he said Aston also “didn’t do as good a job as we should have at saving weight”.Timing was also working against Aston from a design perspective, which meant it didn’t get to explore “multiple (car aerodynamic) concepts in depth,” according to Newey.The team, which has been investing heavily in its resources and facilities at its base in Silverstone, just across the road from the track that hosts the British GP, also has had to introduce “better systems and processes that underpin how we design and build the car,” Newey said.A structural problem had become evident.“We were relying on tools and processes that had been patched and bodged for years – you could trace some of them right back to the very early days of the Jordan team that was based here in Silverstone (in the 1990s), long before Aston Martin returned to the grid (in 2021),” Newey said.“At some point, a system that’s just patch‑on‑patch stops being fit for purpose. That’s where we had got to. The result was a very frustrating car build. Parts weren’t being ordered at the right time – not because people weren’t doing their jobs, but because the underlying system was failing them.”