Formula 1, Sportrik Media - Fernando Alonso has warned that Aston Martin may be forced to retire his car during the 2026 Australian Grand Prix if any reliability concern appears during the race at Albert Park. The Spanish driver admitted the team must approach the race cautiously due to limited components available for the weekend.
The situation follows comments from team principal Adrian Newey, who revealed the team only has two remaining batteries from its Honda power unit pool, both of which are currently installed in the cars. This shortage has forced the team to manage the weekend carefully to avoid further failures that could eliminate the drivers from the race.
Only Alonso managed to participate in qualifying on Saturday, while team-mate Lance Stroll failed to record a lap during the session. With a demanding 58-lap race scheduled for Sunday, Alonso acknowledged the team will need to continuously monitor the car’s condition throughout the event.
“We will be flexible every lap. We will monitor the situation. As Adrian said, we are short on parts, so there are no secrets on that,” Alonso told the media.
“China is next week. Hopefully, we can do as many laps as possible, and hopefully we can do nearly the whole race.
“But at the first sign that there is something potentially wrong, we can't risk running, running, running until we create some big damage and compromise next week.”
Alonso qualified 17th after being eliminated in the opening segment of the session. Despite the difficult weekend, he highlighted that completing trouble-free laps during the second and third practice sessions allowed the team to finally unlock some pace from the car.
“I've been trouble-free in FP2 and FP3, so that allowed me to finally be on track and in sync with all the cars and try different things on the setup,” he explained.
“Even if the power unit is the same as yesterday, we gained two seconds today just because we were on track and were optimising things on the chassis and things like that.”
Alonso concluded that the AMR26 still shows promising potential, but consistency and reliability remain key concerns as the team continues to understand the car.
“There is huge potential in the car; we just need more laps. We just need more consistency.
“It seems very fragile at the moment, as car 18 shows. It depends on the day.”
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