Lance Stroll: Aston Martin is "four seconds off" after tough start to F1 2026 pre-season

It has been a very troublesome start to F1 2026 for Aston Martin with problems in Barcelona, Bahrain and in the production of its car

Lance Stroll was extremely downbeat after Aston Martin’s tough start to pre-season testing for the 2026 Formula 1 campaign - claiming “we’re four seconds off”.

The Silverstone outfit was four days late to the first collective shakedown of the year in Barcelona before Stroll completed just 36 laps on day one of this week’s Bahrain test - only Franco Colapinto had fewer.

That was the result of Aston Martin detecting “a data anomaly” from the new Honda power unit, thus forcing Stroll out for much of the action, which saw Max Verstappen complete the most laps with 136.

“Right now, we look like we're four seconds off the top team, four and a half seconds,” said Stroll. “Impossible to know what fuel loads and everything people are running. But, yeah, now we need to try and find four seconds of performance.”

The 27-year-old said that after setting a best time of 1m39.883s, which was 5.214s off pacesetter Lando Norris but as Stroll pointed out, there are the usual caveats that come with testing.

Even so, it hasn’t been the start Aston Martin hoped for given the huge expectations it had coming into this year’s regulation change with a new engine and Adrian Newey as team boss.

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That accompanies all the investment billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll has put into the team, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a fast car, particularly one which started its wind tunnel programme four months late - per Newey.

“We have all the tools to fight for race wins and championships,” added Stroll. “We're not doing that at the moment and we have to think about what we can do about it.

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images

“Do we want to fight for race wins? Yes. Are we fighting for race wins today? It doesn't look like it. Does that mean we can fight for race wins in the future? No, I believe we can.

“So, I don't have a crystal ball, I didn't have a crystal ball before the season started, and we are where we are here today. It doesn't look like it's amazing. Can that change in the next few weeks? Can it get a lot better? For sure. Will it 100% get way better? I don't know. I don't have the answers to those questions.

“All I can say is we're pushing as hard as we can. We're focused on bringing performance to the car, to the engine every single second of every single day and time will tell how competitive we look at the first race and throughout the whole season.”

Stroll then claimed the problems are “a combination of things” pinpointing the “engine, balance, grip” before offering a very short answer when asked about positives: “The livery looks nice.”